Ask HN: Are We Getting Dumber?

2 points by lyfeninja 31 days ago | 4 comments

I have a very accomplished relative who I trust a lot and has been a role model for me. I've always trusted their judgement and they've never steered me wrong to date. I was recently having a conversation with them about sort of everything. During the conversation I essentially asked what separates success from failure (it was an open ended across the board kind of question) and their response was "critical thinking skills".

Seems like I simple answer, but I've also always felt the same way. Some of my biggest pet peeves are people just accepting outcomes without explanation, writing off things as merely coincidence without digging deeper, or offloading the burden of thinking to someone else.

Given the rapid pace of AI and it's ability to be a crutch, the misinformation and disinformation that plaques the internet, and people just settling for the simplest answer without questioning or thinking through the methodology to get there or whether or not it's true, ARE WE GETTING DUMBER?

It's an honest but kind of scary question and I'm just curious what others think. We're taught we'll only get smarter with time as long as we trust the scientific method and other empirical philosophies, but are those days behind us? Distrust in science, true experts, and everything that we see, has a profound negative effect and I guess I just worry. I don't want to live in the world of Idiocracy (I'm thinking of the movie, watch it if you don't know what I'm talking about lol) but I feel like we're there already...

mdp2021 30 days ago |

> I've also always felt the same way

You do not "feel".

> Getting Dumber?

Random people are getting dumber relatively to having become more vocal (the idiots have left the bars), properly cultivated people are just struggling to cope with the world of morons, climbed to any position, claiming legitimacy.

> taught ... only get smarter with time as long as we trust the scientific method and other empirical philosophies

I can't believe what I am reading, the paradox in it.

> Distrust in science

Kid, do yourself and the world a favour, spend your spare time studying Philosophy of Science intensively.

Repent immediately: ___of course___ critical thinking is paramount and foundational.

tim-tday 30 days ago |

There’s a real danger of cognitive surrender. When Ai can puzzle things out for you there’s a real danger of relaxing our focus.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

jzu48 30 days ago |

We have always been dumb. Its just that so much status signalling happens around intelligence that we forget how dumb we are.

See Theory of Bounded Rationality which won a nobel prize.

It was born out of asking a simple question - if all the leaders and institutions during WW2 had experienced the horrors of WW1 how come they failed at preventing WW2?

And the answer is there are limits to what humans can do.

yuiopqwert 30 days ago |

If we replace AI with the internet, I think that we might get a answer which is hopefully nuanced.

What did the internet gave us: well it gave us researchers who could collaborate with each other instantly and research journals and so much research data which can be used with data science to give us so many beautiful gifts of life. Truly what a wonderful world we live in. Teachers can connect to students and teach online and information has no limits, no boundaries. (Could AI perhaps help in that just as much)

Yet at the same time, Internet has introduced us to Social media, it has made us all feel insecure about our bodies, our financials and always wanting to one-up each other. It has created addictions, it has created so many problems with big tech exploiting us (Meta famously tracks if a young girl deletes her selfie, that means she's insecure and so it would show them predatory makeup/body ads), (would AI feed on our insecurity?)

What a treachorous world we live in. Everyone doom-scrolling to eternity with seemingly no hope.

before AI, we were already inside doom-scrolling, I mean Tiktok was the fad before AI really and it asks the same question as in: are people getting dumber too.

realisitically, I like to think that there's a societal resistance to change (which is a good thing IMO), Trillions are flowing into AI for any use-case, good or bad, no matter what to figure out this black box technology. a16z has some thoughts about not ever introspecting every in life so there is something... This is the effect of so much money flowing that some dumbness exists. Within Society, we have lost meaning and connection for what its worth in some aspects of it so money is the thing which has gotten the most outsized example.

Epstein is the example of it. Billionaires raping young girls yet as a society we are still not giving them proper justice. Aren't we as a society doomed or dumb enough then. This is dumbness in my opinion just as much if not more.

Coming back to the point regarding AI, as a society we would have some filters so the idea of idiocracy might not be so much there. People are getting into pschosis which is causing them to be dumb. its tricking into our emotions of feeling connected because Linear Algebra is getting good at predicting words similar to how humans speak.

Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems really. AI fad will wore off in terms of internet fad, Its unclear to me and nobody (including domain specific experts) can really predict the future as such, as much as you might like to think of the future, sadly its hard to predict or then account for it. We don't know what's in the future and perhaps that's where the joy or the sadness is as we live in this journey of world and people we meet in it.