Talk radio and then cable news really ushered in the political entertainment era where what matters most is whether a story feels right for a narrow audience, and then the internet provided the amped up version. I wouldn’t say dumber as much as provocative but once the ad-tech engines started rewarding hot takes they became predominant.
I think the modern era has made throw away B.S. far more effective.
I don't think the total ratio of B.S. has actually changed all that much.
It wasn't the same bullshit, and it might not have been so in your face in day to day life, but I'd argue it was just as bad.
There’s definitely an increase in just basic disconnect from reality type discourse.
People reading many books doesn't help when a few entities control all the information people get.
This is why the internet is so important and why people who want to save us from disinformation have more blood on their hands than every false news peddler outside the government.
Or think of it in terms of Gresham's Law: Bad discourse drives out good.
But maybe... if the ratio stayed the same, but what got amplified/liked/upvoted got dumber, then the algorithms would guarantee that what we see got a higher ratio of junk. (But if that's true, then eventually the first two paragraphs will come into play, and the proportion will in fact change.)
Maybe it is exactly because education is free [at least in part of Europe] that people do not value it anymore [there].
On reflection: no, it's the phones, folks. On a recent train ride, a young woman sitting diagonnally in front from me was frantically typing on her cellphone. It appeared from a distance she was cutting out some phrase, putting it into a frame and posting it to a social network. While this took just seconds, the task was itself interrupted by her checking chat messages from multiple contacts, each of which she replied in less than two seconds. This is something that I've had to watch in public spaces a lot: the compulsion to react on incomming messages - but then at the receiving end the dopamin kicks in until a reply to the response is sent and so on, ad infinitum. Timing-wise, there is little time to think deeply about what to write, the content becomes victim to short utterance ping-pong.
The empirical evidence for cognitive benefits of reading books is so numerous and obvious that citing sources feels silly. Reading increases vocabulary, which are the building blocks that ideas are formed. This alone would be worth the time cost but reading also increases concentration, improves memory, and reduces cognitive decline.
Reading books is roughly the same level of benefit as exercise.
[0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-...
After being forced to read books in high school over the summer (school mandated summer reading) I got turned off on reading for years until I picked up Harry Potter. That changed my perspective and I read gobs of books now. I actually prefer to read information mostly than to watch a video about it.
One idea I read somewhere (online) is to financially incentivize them once they get an understanding of cash/money. No clue if it would work or how effective it would be.
My kid is on the way and my spouse has zero interest in reading.
We also made age appropriate audiobooks available to them and all 4 adore listening. Congrats on your baby! I’ve never been more exhausted in my life but I’m loving it.
-fewer books-
...sorry, I had to, since we're talking about literacy :)
Perfection.
Likewise, he's only proposing a pilot program with five grocery stores, which isn't a huge capital expenditure for a large city.
Raising property taxes while freezing rents (meaning your shitty NYC apt will never be repaired again), $30 min wage and corporate tax increase and 0.1% tax of stock and options trades (driving jobs away)
Isn't it interesting that the most capitalist country in the world is also the most successful, while the similarly sized and more socialist leaning eu is lagging behind?
Also there's a difference between economic socialism, and the capitalist liberal democracies that run on some social principles like the eu and uk.
The ongoing Socialist Evolution starting with the migration of pretty much the entire developed world over the middle part of the 20th Century from relatively pure capitalism to modern mixed economies that been a pretty big success story in terms of human welfare, despite some periods of widespread or more local backsliding.
which of the groups do you think read vs just swallow cable news?
Trump was definitely an inflection point, though. But he's a symptom of a bigger disease.
Even Trump-like demagogues like Jair Bolsonaro and Nigel Farage already had a political career before him.
What is new isn't that politicians got dumber, it is that the dumbest of them got the megaphones of social media.
Likely you skimmed over it, but if not, what a thread to comment without reading the article on :D
Politics is dumb because the electorate lacks a deeper understanding of policies and tradeoffs, so shallow, partisan takes win elections. The problem isn't that a Dickensian metaphor went over the heads of college literature students; it's that practically all the information most adults consume is intellectual junk food, and people aren't used to challenging their views or taking on different perspective.
The winner is pretty much always the candidate that gets the most eyeballs. A voting based political structure is fundamentally deeply biased towards visibility, and candidates that can get bigger reach with their message will get more votes independent of how low quality that message is.
That has caused all popular vote based politics around the entire planet to converge on simple, viral messaging, and inflammatory messaging tends to be more viral.
The other way to phrase it would be to say that popular vote systems hold politicians accountable to the number of eyeballs their antics reach, and we need to switch to a system that holds politicians accountable to the success of their policies.
Huxley was right.
Still a problem tho.
If people are reading less now than they did in 1980, clearly it's not because of the paywalls. Reading is one of the few things that got cheaper and cheaper if you count inflation.
It's quite the opposite: we have way more free entertainment than before.
It's just that in place of casual reading people choose brain rot, not because of the reading but because of the stimulation.
I recently went on an analogue book binge, and discovered something I'd not previously noticed. Possibly for commercial reasons, books tend to frequently be much longer than they need to be, (coincidentally) they're often a minimum of 200-250 pages. Books that could easily have their content conveyed in 25 or 50 pages will be padded to 200. And not just literary trash (of which there's a lot) but books that are highly recommended reading.
Another big disadvantage of books is you receive exactly 1 perspective. Whereas if you actively research a domain with web access, you can cross reference and absorb a variety of contrasting (/conflicting) sources, and by smashing the ideas together enough, you can figure out which arguments are strongest.
I'd also argue the study mentioned in the article is unfair. Not understanding English from the early 1800's doesn't make you an idiot; a lot of the context and literally the words and language itself are very different to modern English. I can sometimes more easily understand written Greek, Spanish or French (I don't speak any of those languages) than old English.
Such now said, and more to the point at hand - instead of the causality suggested by the article's title, I'd look for a common cause. When most of the population feels that their present circumstances have fallen far from their hopes of yesteryear, and their future prospects growing ever bleaker, then they neither spend time appreciating long and clever written works, nor gravitate toward wise and foresighted political positions.
Humans really ain't at their best when they're running angry, anxious, and scared.
*Mr. Dickens wrote almost entirely during the reign of Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India. And it definitely shows.
People like the dons mentioned in the article used to resist dumbing down the curriculum. "Read the complicated text, or you don't get a degree. I don't care if you think it's harsh, and I don't care if none of you can do it."
Now, you want to be a popular don, don't you? Wouldn't want a negative review. What do the customers think? Oh, they're used to a diet of intellectual junk food. Not much point in serving them literary vegetables, then.
Politics is the same. There has been a complete breakdown of the feedback loop of proposing new legislation and then looking at the results. That sort of thing takes attention. But it's hard to do, you know? Just give me soundbites, so I can point my finger at my least favorite politician. This has rotted both the voters and the journalists.
If we're going to let everything be decided by money, the money needs to reward good behaviors.
pseudolus•2h ago