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That sounds plausible — kudos to the author for at least entertaining the possibility. Here's my hypothesis on why:
Marvin's Maxim: Every generation believes that the next generation is going to hell. Every generation is wrong.
The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. Don't know if mental illness is going up or down - our understanding and perception of it has changed so there's hardly reliable data on it. I'd have to go through a similar thought process as this article. But I think it's a factor, beyond "new media". I suspect that the toxic politics in the US is a similar phenomenon, the way people are controlled by confirmation bias and can twist their way into believing "my guy good, other guy bad" under almost any circumstances.
Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an optimized stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a look at the front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs): Half of the content highlights stupidity of others: /r/IdiotsInCars shows the worst drivers from around the world, /r/insanepeoplefacebook shows the most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.
Twitter isn't much better: Topics spread on Twitter when they promote outrage or allow the reader to feel smugly superior to someone.
If you spend your days online consuming this content day in and day out, you're going to become convinced that the world is "stupid" and getting stupider. In reality, you're simply tapping into stupidity concentrators, getting bite-sized views of stupidity so you can react in astonishment and feel superior to stupid people doing stupid things.
I think COVID quarantine has worsened this, as people are getting even more of their worldview through social media feeds instead of actually interacting with people in the real world. If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is expanding". In reality, it's a sign that you need to revaluate your sources of information and move to platforms and networks where people are talking about something other than other people's stupidity.
> I am acquiring greater wisdom with age as I ought, but the average age of the typical person I encounter stays the same so they cannot keep up. I’m noticing the contrast increasing but misattributing it. My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
Maybe stupidity is just entertaining and gets promoted because of that? As I watch another flat earth debunking video suggested by youtube to have a laugh I'm wondering ... Am I the part of the problem? How popular stupidity would be without people pointing fingers at stupidity and laughing?
I feel it is quite insidious and not many have a defense against it.
The way outlier theories and polarized content can now reach a crowd that was hitherto undreamed of. And people get swept up in it.
We must learn from this, but we as technologists should also put the cat back into bag, to make our algorithms not promote “stupidity” , and to educate people to discern information.
So I think the idea that stupidity has increased is an illusion. The thing in the modern world is more that the tolerance for stupidity has decreased so we discover it more. The sad truth is also that each one of us believes in lots of stupid things but we are more interested in finding errors in other when in self improvement. Like Jesus said, "and why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?"
Counterintuitively, people love reading about and engaging in what they consider "stupidity". Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an optimized stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a look at the front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs): Half of the content highlights stupidity of others: /r/IdiotsInCars shows the worst drivers from around the world, /r/insanepeoplefacebook shows the…
This is a part of it to be sure. This line of thinking is becoming more and more popular and accepted as the only truth is that there is none. The enlightenment era scientific-liberal approach is rapidly disintegrating. But I don't think the pomo philosophers would actually think an entirely new meta-narrative would be constructed from their ideas. In fact their premise was that there are no true meta-narratives. But they've had parts of their ideas cherry picked to advance a new, illiberal agenda.
People have gotten stupider because the world is too complex (and fundamentally impossible) to understand in a completely rational way. Historically we have relied upon intuition, heuristics, and a network of trusted authority figures (usually a network of trusted institutions). The modern condition (post Enlightenment) can be understood as the elevation of rationality over all else and hostility towards heuristics a…
> [the world is fundamentally impossible] to understand in a completely rational way But it isn’t - rationality doesn’t mean knowing everything. We can be rational and also rely on heuristics; we only evolved those heuristics in the first place because they mostly work. So it’s perfectly reasonable to trust them in the absence of evidence.