If there were stupid people back then and there are still stupid people now, wouldn't the interesting thing be to look at what's different?

I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube.

"Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"

The history of Opium is likely more relevant.

It is a dismissive, since we see degradation of literacy within the past 20 years.

https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...

We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes.

AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)

The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.

I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology.

But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least some truth to some of them, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator even for doing basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.

I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I read The Power Broker a 1,000-page tome in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives.

> Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound.

For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in.

Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.