Does anyone else feel like 90% of the population is stupid?
To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."
I'm not so sure, I saw this short the other day of this Gen z woman with a caption that said something like "you can tell gen z from millennial by the rise of their jeans" with her wearing mid rise (labeled low) and high rise jeans, and the comments were full of millennial women pointing out that in the 90s the low rise was like way way way low (which they were) or that millennial wore low rise first, or that it was a bad style or whatever input they felt they needed to give
And I realized this Gen z girl doesn't care about any of this, and is actually quite clever, she's just effectively gotten an insane amount of engagement and is positioning herself as an influencer because much of my generation are idiots and are commenting and reacting on her stuff over the rise of pants
One thing that seems to be true for so long as we have been writing stuff: people 35 and older have always always complained about how hopelessly stupid/lazy/off the people under 25 are and how society is doomed when those folks take over. I take comfort that we seem to have consistently gotten this wrong for hundreds of years.
Ya, I don't think they're lazy or stupid but I'm clearly seeing enormous swaths of people being herded by social media and it's quite fascinating to see. Prior to this generation, the ability to influence wasn't nearly as easy to do and attention spans weren't quite as easy to capture. Now we're all captured by the device we're holding and influenced by one thing or another.
A major difference is they can get information whenever they want.
It used to be sort of hard to find academic knowledge outside of an institution. Now you can download it all for free on libgen and have youtubers walk you through it.
That kind of accessibility causes people to take it for granted.
The biggest difference is where the information is coming from, moreso than its availability imo. Previously what you read in a journal or textbook was typically pretty well vetted, it's hard to say that about the information I'm getting here.
It used to be sort of hard to find academic knowledge outside of an institution. Now you can download it all for free on libgen and have youtubers walk you through it.
their information
You're conflating "their information" with "academic information."