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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.
Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.
Many college kids can learn a computer game in an evening, order stuff online, backpack on another continent and drive a car through rush hour traffic. Yet they can't do long division which only requires repeating four simple steps. Someone who is mentally incapable of learning 332423/234 after 12 years of math training stands no chance when it comes to being able to buy cinema tickets in an app in five minutes or using a self checkout machine. People claim to be too low Iq to learn the times table yet are capable of memorizing other things.
School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have. Math is one of the toughest subjects to skip chapters in. If you haven't mastered one chapter in the book the next chapter is impossible. Kids develop an identity of being bad at math and society accepts this instead of forcing them to repeat the basics until they have mastered it.
Holy crap, I just realized I don't know how to do long division anymore.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
I've never really learned it and I'm an engineer that graduated with top grades 15-20 years ago. The only occasion I've needed it was during the SATs and it was easy enough to figure out during the test.
It's both useless and easy at the same time.
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Well I majored in mathematics and I can't say I exactly recall the long division algorithm I was taught in high school either. I'm sure I could recreate it or something similar if I needed to. But that's the point - any time I've needed to divide two large digit numbers in the past 15 or so years I've used a calculator or computer because not only is it faster, it's also easier to verify correctness. People forgetting things they don't use isn't a bug of the brain, it's a feature (ugh, and now any time I use a "it isn't x, it's y" construction I worry about sounding like chatgpt). I'd only really be worried if I thought I'd lost the capacity to relearn long division. I haven't yet, have you?
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