The average American is as literate as a 5th to 6th grader.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
5th to 6th graders are 10 to 12 years old, normally.
So uh… yep, mhm, the average American is about as stupid as a 12 year old, that’s a bit on the optimistic side though.
Dude’s theory isn’t really wrong, Americans are dumb and immature as fuck, and yes the statistics exist to back that up.
Honestly it terrifies me when I think about this.
I’m too stupid to be smarter than this many people.
Sadly, nope, if you can read at a high school level, there’s roughly a 75% chance you are smarter than any rando you meet.
For the last 5 or 10 years, more and more kids graduate highschool with middleschool or worse reading / writing abilities.
People even make tiktoks about going off to college and admitting they literally cannot understand the words in their assigned texts, start going through some kind of literacy crash course…
Some people even make videos like that explaining that even after a Bachelor’s or Associates degree, nope, still can barely read.
I am starting to notice this in the slop youtube throws at me that I am sometimes dumb enough to click on.
Somebody reading some article to give commentary on it, and you can just tell they are reading one word at a time, misunderstanding what 15% of them mean, have to actually stop on 5% of the words because those ones they’ve never read before, and then they start complaining that the author must have just been using a thesaurus… because a few of the vocab words in the article are 8th grade or above.
… I picked up reading quickly, so quickly that when I was in 2nd grade, I was assigned to go out into the hall when I was done with my classwork (I always finished rapidly) and then go help a 4th or 5th grader who was behind in reading skills, go sit with them and have them or me read aloud, help them with words they didn’t know, etc.
Everyday, even on the net, I encounter more people who… are beyond graduating high school age, who barely read better than 5th graders with dyslexia.
some kind of literacy crash course…
I love how today actual literacy isn’t even a thing. No one talks about teaching readimg and writing (in the EU, at least). It’s all about financial literacy, digital literacy, social media literacy, hell, even (and bear with me here) AI literacy. Yes, really. There’s probably 800 of these fake literacies floating around.
Whoever thought of this is an idiot. The word literacy means one thing: the ability to read and write (and perhaps understand what you read/wrote). Nothing more, nothing less.
It isn’t just stupid, it’s also malicious. Kids all over the globe are suffering from poor literacy, and instead of fixing the problem you quite literally shift the goalposts.
Why be able to read and consult a dictionary when I can just consult AI or social media to explain it to my borderline-illiterate brain?
DON'T LOOK
Obligatory /s for the final paragraph
When AI services enshittify by raising their price barriers, or when just… infrastructure generally collapses to a serious degree such that many people just literally cannot use them…
Much of Gen Z and A, either reliant on or just totally raised on using AI to do their thinking and work for them…
They will basically go feral, they won’t be able to get their fix, a part of their ‘brain’ will have been ‘removed’, and they will literally be dysfunctional.
And I shouldn’t just single out younger people, though its more prevalent and severe with them, there are certainly many millenials and older who’ve also just given up good chunks of their thinking abilities to AI, which is largely a proprietary service that go undergo a price hike just like Xbox or Netflix.
… I used to think the ending to DX Human Revolution was a tropey cop out, that broke from basically the rest of the game’s narrative and gameplay themes, just a zombie apocalypse at the end of your spy thriller.
Now I realize that was the point, maybe still a bit hamfisted or over the top, but… yep, yep, people become reliant on things they aren’t actually 8n control of for just basic day to day living, and then you actually break that, take it away from them?
Yep, zombie apocalypse is not too far off from what would actually play out.
Bro what are you smoking. Gen-Z is getting up their 30s, they’re by far the most vocally anti-AI group out there. The only ones who willingly and readily outsource their brains to it are boomers.
By most definitions, the oldest Gen Z would have been born in 1997 and would thus be 28, the youngest Gen Z would have been born in 2012 and would thus be 13.
So uh… yeah, yeah, younger Gen Zs are very susceptible to what I described.
And also… sure, a lot of Gen Zs are very anti-AI.
A lot of them are also the very techbro douche bag types that jump from tech scam to tech scam, tell people how AI will make it so much easier for them to do some … thing they have no idea how to do.
Its polarizing, but we have actual data.
The people who most often use AI tools every day are Gen Z.
Millennials may be more likely to use them in some professional work capacity, (largely because they are simply more likely to have jobs where thats part of it) but its Gen Z and younger that… have significant chunks that literally just do all their homework and college work with AI tools and thus never learn anything.
Millenials are, you know, too old to have been able to take that shortcut. Same with GenX and Boomers, though I do agree they are more willing to give up actually thinking as they age.
Now older gens use those tools at work, yes, but… when you take them away, they will go away from work last, and for general consumer use first…
…and people who were not able to AI their way through school will still have some of those core mental capabilities, whereas people who never learned those core abilities, had AI do their school for them… won’t have any core abilities.
If the oldest Gen-Zer is 28, and youngest is 13, assuming an even distribution, that puts the average Gen-Z is roughly 20 and a half, long past done with school, assuming school means school and does not include university or higher ed and stops at 18, then in fact the vast majority of Gen-Z are done with the vast majority of school.
This invalidates your point, and while I’m curious about your rather odd source link that I’m not clicking till I can verify what that is at the desktop, I doubt it supports your free-associative generational generalisations about ill-defined spooks like “mindset” and some ramblings about tech scams that you happily append to your maybe-true data point about AI tool use.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s embarrassing to make such an obvious error in an argument where you claim “kids these days” are somehow dumber.
The skill involved in not simply parroting points that fit your conclusions, but actually understanding what you’re parroting is called critical thinking.
As one of those “kids these days” who is 27, from my experience, very much including this exchange, boomers and the vast majority of Gen X have absolutely no intellectual capabilities and interacting with one makes it exceedingly obvious.
They often cannot read, and if they can - they cannot read more than a paragraph without getting lost, and they often cannot write properly either.
This makes sense when you consider that even in the laziest pursuit of talking with a chatbot – the average Gen-Zer probably reads more text in a day incidentally than an average Gen Xer reads in their entire life even if they’re fairly well-read.
A thought that’s been popular during the pandemic is how “our brains” weren’t “meant” to process all the information that comes from the internet and that it leads to some sort of overwhelming of the faculties, but in personal anecdote - I’ve never experienced this or even known anyone who has. If I trust my eyes and ears (and pretend like IRL isn’t just another, arguably far more self-serving selective echo chamber than any corporate algo even like the olds do), I could easily conclude that misinformation in general is a phenomenon almost entirely confined to people over the age of Gen-Z.
While the move to video is a real phenomenon, I would argue that it does not by itself evidence a decline in basic intelligence, and is a self-fulfilling prophecy where monetisation on video was much easier to do well due to inherently better CTR/engagement/impact on impressions than traditional banner ads that supported written sides, leading for it to be more widespread and therefore concentrating a lot of useful and entertaining content and information in video, leading people to read less.
Again, though – the above is a side tangent because most Gen-Z were born long before this phenomenon occurred.
And before you bring this up - yes, literacy rates have gone down due to the economic decline/collapse of the western capitalist model and monetary policies of austerity alongside the culture of anti-intellectualism and gerontocracy who perpetuates it like their arteries perpetuate lead in their bloodstream, but again – this does not impact the vast majority of Gen-Z who are done with the vast majority of school.
While I’m no scientist and I actually don’t think I’m smart at all, I do think what thinking skills I do have - I owe to exposure to various “tech scams”, making mistakes, examining them, disregarding authority, not blindly trusting, learning the difference between an opinion and truth, and learning to reason correctly.
It is exposure to information - good and bad - that makes you a decent judge of information.
Also, while I focus my equally free-associative personal anecdote observations (the immovable object to the unstoppable force of an overly broad generalisation) on the boomers and the gen-x, but millennials to me while definitely more outwardly intelligent probably due to better education, diet, habit and lesser alcohol consumption, overall they lack a certain rigour and intensity required to truly drill deep.
Looking back at political debates and discussions during the Great financial crash in 2008, it really does feel like I’m watching simpletons talk about rather basic things as if they’re complex and puzzling. I stand on the shoulder of giants etc. etc. but this even applies to ideas that to them and me are equally from the distant past.
As an American, this is accurate. I had a conversation with my wife not too long ago about how until I met her, I felt like I was always surrounded by idiots. I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way. I did not know one person who continued any sort of self education in adulthood. Once they were out of school, that was it. It blew my mind. Life should be a daily striving to learn more. They seriously would not pick up a book, or research any topic outside of headlines.
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12 year olds are on average a lot smarter than your usual GOP congresscritter. In fact howler monkeys are smarter than your average GOP congresscritter.
True. When I was young I thought why don’t we use the military domestically. Yeah it doesn’t work.
It actually works really well, if your goal is fascism.
This lines up with what I’ve been shouting into the void whenever I read a news article. “Where are the fucking adults?!”
You just made me remember that book that came out in his first term reassuring everyone that there were “adults in the room” protecting us from certain doom.
What a crock of shit that turned out to be.
when you reach the milestone of adulthood and take a peek behind the veil of responsibility…
… maybe Larry Niven was right in Ringworld, Humanity’s only defining trait is not our intelligence, our compassion, or our strength of will, but simply the luck of the few.
When I was 12 I wanted to send the worst criminals to live in prisons in Somalia so that Somolies could have jobs and we would never have to see criminals…
And now there is a literal version of that idea from a 12 year old
It’s a nation filled to the brim with children trapped in adult bodies.
This is not an opinion because I’m perpetually online. I go outside and they’re there too. Literally everywhere.
I was a shut-in before the 2024 Election. I figured social spaces there were somewhat immature because the mature people would have jobs and real life involvement. Then I started going outside, and I lost all hope. I’m too stupid for people to be this dumb. (Though I’ll admit, social media, algorithmic content, and the AI products probably made people dumber.)
Although Hanlon’s razor says “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”, I’d argue never misjudge malicious intent for stupidity. The first makes you just look a bit dumb, the second makes you a victim.
I think there does come a point where stupidity and malice are basically the same thing.
After a certain tipping point, stupidity en masse becomes indistinguishable from malice. The result is more important than the intent.
Reddit’s razor? Harambe’s razor?
The worst part is: yes! Tons of studies come to that conclusion. Be it reading comprehension, lead poisoning, or the active dismantling of the US education system for the last eight decades, it’s all part of the same picture. But what can you do about it if the group of preteens is self governing and won’t see the problem?
Twelve year-old attitude, 2 year-old selfishness.
I think you’re underestimating 12-year olds here.
This concept could be an entire Lemmy community.
Makes too much sense. Is this guy CIA?
Since 2012 twelve year olds controlled the memes, also when an explosion of boomers joined social media. We’ve been letting the kids parents the adults for 13 years now.
the worst kind of 12yo is the one who want to change the world for the better but they’re fucking stupid so their well intensions end up serving the bad guys and screwing everybody else. the story of ukrainian NGOs - literally did the dirty job for oligarch and stayed in denial until the stink became biohazard.
the worst kind of 12yo is the one who want to change the world for the better
Ah, so you’ve never met one of those kids that just likes torturing animals for fun
I actually haven’t met these kinds of folks until later in life when I moved out to another city. I knew about this shit - Dnipropetrovsk maniacs was media shitshow and stuff but i had no folks like that in my immediate circle while growing up.
I think 12 may be too high. Most kids I’ve knew who acted like that were like 6.
I think humanity is really slowly being replaced by LLMs.
Presentation and simple, but stupid and wrong ideas, are preferred over actually researching and understanding situations, isolating the underlying issues and working on ways to resolve or at least lessen them.
Just like LLMs, fewer and fewer people seems to care about a deeper understanding, and more about if the stream of words look ‘good’.
