Shit is about to hit the fan.

A bifurcation is a non-continuous change to a system as a result of a continuous parameter changing.

For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.

In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.

I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.

The good news is the ocean is vast. You don't need to be on a Titanic.

I think there is for a snapshot in time of education or work which is how we commonly think of work right? It isn't true of course. But we sort try to group work into periods of stability between revolutions, industrial, digital or whatever.

We have a chance to adapt, that's for sure. But white-collar work might not exist (or just resemble) as it does today.

But I agree, the category is almost too malleable to analyze.

Everything is a wave and there are always oscillations.

I think we see the slowing down primarily in hiring right?

The issue is that you're talking in abstraction and it isn't clear what the concrete thing is you're thinking of. Bluntly: you're being obscure rather than illuminating.

For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?

I think GP's was a reference to Politics and the English Language (1946)—not "1984". An essay against convoluted writing styles.

https://www.fadedpage.com/link.php?file=20180223.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

Orwell's 6 rules for good writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Now you tell me

Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.

Jira, is that you? Have you become sentient?

Archive link: https://archive.ph/n8Akh

They do indeed, but that does not make the method by which they choose to do so free of consequences.

Bank robbers, gun runners, and chiropractors also need to put food in the table.

- Browner

Doesn't this just shift the average and calibrate a new set of expectations for the coming youth to placate themselves in an age of all or nothing AI?

something something the purpose of a system is what it does

Indeed, and some countries have whole word writing.

Teaching phonics is one thing the English education system got right.

Similarly, algebra needs to be automatic to do calculus.

Everything builds on everything else.

There is a 99% probability this will not happen in your lifetime. Half the point of school is so someone has supervision over children for 6 hours and to be part of a small community.

If anything, if someone is looking for an AI proof job while not wanting to do something braindead, teaching might be one of the good jobs that may get more competitive.

AI improves a student's ability to learn. It does nothing to improve a student's motivation to learn.

Motivating students to learn is not at all a solved task. And arguably a harder one too. Even the ~2010 "Google and grit" self-teaching is enough to outperform public education - but most students don't have the motivation to pull that off in practice. They have the opportunity, but that matters little if they don't use it.

Modern public education is just state subsidized daycare to keep the population at their 9-5.

That's a very attractive idea. KhanMigo was supposed to embody that potential. Seems like it hasn't.

Some kids really enjoy learning. Never mind merely solving an educational assessments problem, personalized learning seems like it has the potential to unlock a lot of intellect across the population. And yet.

I saw an ad with a guy saying he doesn't write e-mails because he can just speak to the machine, and then the AI does it for him.

Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...

The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.

That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.

Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.

I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.

how is "worse at reading" evaluated?

I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question.

people need new skills in a new age.

If it's a skill that is picked up in minutes, it's not really a skill.

Your comment reads like satire.

Kids are not training LoRas without a big budget. I fought for $5 from my parents, I could write C for free.

Education isn't broken, it's gotten too conservative and not able to keep up as a result.

According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.

So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.

I see kids ... discuss post-modern philosophy

Tell us more?

Why is that weird? I remember when I was a kid, I tried to imitate what my parents were doing, too. Lucky for me, we didn't have smartphones at the time.

I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.

A society is self similar because a huge portion of our social actions are not thought about but copied. Being a parrot saves a massive amount of energy in descending the behavior gradient.

I teach college… you rent wrong on what they output, you are wrong on the inference drawn from it.

On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.

While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?

they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago

Such as?

If they have no emotional connection to texts from the 50s, then how are they discussing post-modern philosophy? Or rather, how shallowly?

1950s texts

The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.

If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.

Fair, maybe finding other ways to measure performance - like actual achievements of kids that you mention - is a better benchmark

No serious person in the field agrees with this.

Outside of science it seems to be that people measure intelligence as "what I feel I have" and nothing else.

Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.

How about this, an IQ test developed in the society you have to survive in is a good indicator of outcomes.

If you want to be a pendant about it then there is no such thing as a comprehensive intelligence test at all as there is no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. But that's not very useful either.

Mind showing a source for IQ declining across the world?

The really interesting thing was that when looking further, the results of non-native students reflected closely the scores of their native countries (not the countries where they now live), which is not at all surprising to me (as an immigrant, I don't think I am smarter because I now live in a "smarter" country even if I would love to be) but goes completely against everything people in the education sector appears to believe.

You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus.

Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.

Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.

In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.

And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.

For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.

I mean they are doing some things over at the Alpha School to work on gamification of education that is actually useful for the modern human, but they get a ton of hate for what they are doing, despite the test results speaking for themselves

(they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).

I know I would not be able to focus for 4 hours on a test that doesn’t matter, while reading text I don‘t care about, so that kids are failing that seems like a non-issue to me.

The rest if your point is simply wrong. Focusing is a physical activity that you can train for. Every good chess player that plays classical trains for that. And so do (or rather so did) students in the education system. Taking mock tests before the finals is a way to train your endurance such that you will be better able to keep your focus throughout the test.

My sons' school makes it a requirement of continued enrolment.

How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)

It's not just a good idea. It's the law[0].

[0] https://www.governor.ny.gov/eliminating-distractions-new-yor...

But you may be still trying to teach kids that are going through a form of withdrawal for several hours because it's not managed outside school.

0. children that listen to the teacher (depends on factors outside the classroom, like how parents raise the child)

Is that a strategy for the 99th percentile or the 50th?

The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores.

It suggests a lot of things, none of which are remotely intelligible with the information we have. The result as always is that people fill those gaps with their pet issues, whatever’s hot today, and tend to ignore anything that doesn’t fit their constructed narrative.

If I understand you correctly, you are using Covid-19 as a means to justify any position (or broad classes of them) which is convenient to you. I say this because you're using it in a broad way, and making an appeal to specific prejudices.

Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative.

Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like:

An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.

I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.

Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined.

we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event of the total failure of our collective brain.

And surely one could never predict the impact of sending kids home for two years and expecting them to manage their own education on their own honor. Surely school aged children are better at paying attention to Zoom meetings than I am as an adult. It's in the computer! Kids are good at computer!

If you click on the article that has actual data, the trend started in 2013 and has been mostly the same since then.

I don't know for kids specifically but average user time: 2012 1:30 2016 2:08 2019-now ~2:30

If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.

I'd say the main difference is that you couldn't take a device with good media capabilities, good and cheap-ish networking and lasting battery everywhere. Laptops, netbooks, tablets were a tad too bulky, lasted only a few hours unplugged and mainly wifi, and mobile internet was not all that great.

It’s controversial because this is a forum with a lot of tobacco growers on it, and they don’t want to hear that smoking causes cancer.

If you’d told me back then that people would actually watch this crap, I would not have believed you.

But not only do they watch it, but they largely prefer it to anything with substance.

Short form video in particular is brain poison, especially when paired with engagement algorithms.

If they are used, sure.

AI, screen time, short form text/video, normalization of recreational drugs, post-truth, there's no one cause but there's lots of things that are not helping

When I was a freshman in college taking CS courses, they were just rolling out a new Java curriculum. And Java being fairly new, the textbooks that we were assigned were absolutely terrible. Just garbage books.

I would bet that plot of WA users vs AI users, same age groups etc would look pretty funny as comparison

Wolfram is a tool, and LLM even without a harness is much closer to an agent.

the event in 2020 would've only been the last straw in a series of bad policy in education. It might've brought forward this same outcome a few years in advance, but it isn't a root cause.

The cohort that started school after the end of restrictions is not 15 yet, so no recovery can be expected until the 2029 PISA test or so.

Poe’s Law at work

I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way.

Here in Illinois it was over a year, possibly two in some places. The schools didn't return to in-person right away after the government mandates were lifted.

Edit:

But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too.

Please re-read the comment from the other person you originally replied to.

(2nd edit: removed something based on a misread)

Obviusly you and your family were not affected by lockdown so badly, congrats. Not everyone was so lucky though.

Staying at home with Grandma and Papa

Lockdown prevented relatives visits.

Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it.

Millions die every year, that is normal for a country with 350 million people!

You know what my kids don't have? My kids don't have a smart phone. You know what my kids don't have? Unlimited access to devices.

My kid did not had device before pandemic, we got tablet for lockdowns. My kid was social and full of energy, it always wanted to play outside and climb trees. Two years of isolation, in tiny apartment were pretty bad!

Now it does not want to go outside, it does not want to socialize! It adapted and got new hobies.

Largely, I think it is the parents though

Yes, i blame myself. For not ignoring lockdowns and not fighting back! Against sociopaths who enforced this bs!

you are correct, but budget cuts are happening nevertheless and it's being used to justify laying off teachers (while admin staff stay employed... strange?)

Tied test scores to what outcomes? Bush the second tried tying test results to one kind of outcomes (school funding), and the result was schools getting worse.

Like in South Korea?

Correct. The likely causality is in the reverse direction.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, it was common to walk your kids to school, then let them play in the playground while chatting with the other parents, until the bell rang.

One mom told me: "I like the American school. It's like Singapore, but with fewer beatings."

Reductiveness is under the surface of many of these numbers. Finland has high teacher salaries, which is a contributing factor but entirely outside of the way teaching methodologies are evaluated.

Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.

My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.

Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings.

I mean, I always was. My rule has always been - if something seems too good to be true, it is.

This is my biggest issue with ‘progressive’ types. They always seem to get drawn in by hype and flash, and neglect to consider 2nd order effects. I’ve had an endless number of conversations with friends of this persuasion where I point out very very obvious problems with some hot new idea they are so enamored with, which they inevitably poo-poo as me being a mean old cynical conservative. And a few years later we end up with articles like above.

In somewhere that period of Finland education system I remember there being testing. Just not large scale standardised testing. But everything did have tests. Still teachers did have quite large freedom even if criteria was state level. Also it was very much traditional lessons with only occasional small scale group work.

One impact for later time was increased immigration and challenges of integrating increasing amount non-native speakers in same system that used to have nearly exclusively native speakers.

"Play based learning" is a huge misnomer, which is unfortunately common in unscientific academic fields like education. Any successful, intrinsically-motived learning is biologically categorized as "play" behavior; and knowledge-based, teacher-centered, direct instruction approaches (i.e. traditional schooling) are the most effective and most likely to be perceived as enjoyable "play" by a school pupil. So-called "play-based" or "student centered" approaches (i.e. expect the student to know what they're supposed to learn by themselves, while the teacher just slacks off) are merely a source of confusion and frustration for shoolkids.

Does math academy still start at 4th grade? How do you compare it to beast academy or AoPS? What incredible results have you observed?

I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.

It is a bicycle for the mind, but the mind still sets the direction. Sometimes it's going faster towards a dumpster.

Here, let me revise that expression: "computers are ELECTRIC bicycles of the mind". You know this feeling, and we know it's how humans operate: when given a choice, we will ALL take the easy path. School is hard, learning is hard, and it all takes years and years of effort. Give a child a computer, or a smartphone, or AI, and all of a sudden, we don't have to expend any effort, like that electric bike. I shut my brain off and trust the ride, because it is effortless. Forget the part about having UNDERSTANDING of why things are true or false, why things work, how they work, how physics and mechanics and chemistry ALL are needed to create things. As an engineer (retired), I see youth having great KNOWLEDGE at their disposal, but feeble to no UNDERSTANDING of how things work, why they work, underlying mechanics, underlying theories, etc.

Ask any youth today about the smartphone in their pocket. Do they have any inkling of the decades of research and development for that device and it's capabilities to coalesce into what it is today? I mused once on some public forum about the inverse square law and how it applied to the fantastical ability of a smartphone to connect with a cell tower 5 miles away. The power received by the tower is approximately 3 times 10^-13 Watts or -95.15 dBm. This, to me is almost magical. Yet the forum members did not even know what the inverse square law was. They just ridiculed my comments and literally downvoted my musings to zero. I can't comprehend the ignorance of today's society.

How about instead of just saying what's wrong, say what's better?

Yep. Even for maths, knowing why is king. Once you understand maths there is a whole bunch that makes sense and you can just derive.

More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.

There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.

One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.

What percentage of people drag us forward kicking and screaming into the future?

More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old

Source?

I thought it was around that magic 20% [1] figure for which you can find support in America for almost any idiocy.

[1] https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...

Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?

Yes, for some definition of "works well" but the population has to be tightly controlled. It's why the oligarchich elite is so enthused to build out the surveillance state at the same time.

Many, many times through out history knowledge and education have been destroyed to prop up some group that want to rule.

Better chance it's the reverse, civilized societies end up educating people.

WWI was the cataclysm that destroyed the global economy.

(Its aftermath was a necessary transition, that happened to be disastrously mismanaged.)

The current proponents of new "realism" who claim that regional empires will co-exist in peace would do well to study the causes of WWI.

Gee, schools got rid of text books and ask only multiple choice questions on Math tests… They now also use AI to grade short essays.

I’d have been more surprised if there wasn’t any impact on learning.

It's a cycle. Affluence of food, goods and tech removes natural survival instincts due to lack of struggle and need. That would cause the affluence to go away, rekindling the survival instincts through struggle. The cycle repeats. Different geographies have different phase delays in this cycle. Sometimes the cycle is affected by artificial forces such as dominance of a nation and it's control over the global matters. But the cycle just pushes forward.

Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.

I'm not that doomer about what you are referring to. I think a lot of kids are wising up to the echo chamber.

Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.

I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.

Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.

My electromagnetics professor started our class with a massive ambition that we would truly understand maxwells equations at a fundamental level by end of semester. Well our class started failing all his exams leading up to this pinnacle and he told us we were all a bunch of morons, basically the dumbest class he’s ever taught. I raised my hand and asked if we were still going to get to maxwells equations by end of semester and he stared back with eyes of pure distain. This was the year 2000.

Been saying this for a while. AI is melting away people's mental and cognitive abilities.

Nobody wants to admit it though due to capitalism and VC drunkenness.

This will reach critical mass in a few years.

There's a whopper in the middle of the article declaring an outcome "high test scores" is a cause, not a result, of a lack of a wide variety of social ills. The cause and effect ratio is obviously reversed. Its like claiming that playing the violin leads to wealth via some magical process, whereas the reality is only wealthy parents can afford to hire a classical violin tutor for their kid, so sure, the wealthiest neighborhoods have the kids who are the best violin players but it would be pretty clueless to describe violin playing as a vocational skill. Its a luxury skill for people who've already made it, like math is for about 99.9% of the population.

Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.

Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.

"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.

The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.

Taking an intercity bus ride in Europe may disabuse you of the idea that short-form video is a threat to males specifically: you're likely to see from your seat several young women consuming short-form videos (often from beauty influencers) for the entire journey.

Are you brown?

The whole system is built on the idea that kids will learn because we force them to for their own good. But I don't think you can get real understanding from that, you need internal motivation that comes from a true desire to know more.

I'm not saying lower test scores are good but they might be a sign that we need to move from "push based" forced complete education in childhood to a more "pull based" system. That would mean the only mandatory part is basic skills as opposed to knowledge, things like reading and arithmetic but also critical thinking, social skills, task organization and manual/mechanical work.

Everything else should be optional, fully up to the student (and their parents until they're 18) and available for their whole lifetime. That's the most important part.

If you go to an accounting school and decide to become a plumber after you graduate, then switch to programming at 30 and electrician at 45, you should be able to do that. Low cost, free if you're poor and always without social stigma, the exact same quality and credentials as if you did it in high school.

Sometimes you need to wait and experience life a bit before you understand how important your education is. We should support that instead of making it so you only have one real shot.

If you graph actual NAEP since 1998 versus a 1998 group-fixed score, you'll see increases (1998-2002, 2005-2013, 2015-2017) and multiple declines twice taking the line back down to the 1998 linear trend prediction (2002-2005, 2017-2024).

It is wrong to get overly exact here though. We are talking about a overall score variance of just 10pts in the face of an achievement gap of nearly 30pts, with an absolutely massive 20% decline in white population share over the 26 year period.

With pre-formatted table:

    Group                           1998 NAEP  2024 NAEP  Change
    -----------------------------  ----------  ---------  ------
    White                                 268        266      −2
    Black                                 242        243      +1
    Hispanic                              241        245      +4
    Asian/Pacific Islander                261        280     +19
    All public-school students            261        257      −4

    Race/ethnicity                     1999 Grade 8  2023 Grade 8    Change
    ---------------------------------  ------------  ------------  --------
    White                                      64.5%         44.0%  −20.5 pp
    Black                                      16.1%         14.9%   −1.2 pp
    Hispanic                                   14.3%         29.4%  +15.1 pp
    Asian/Pacific Islander                      3.9%          5.9%   +2.0 pp
    American Indian/Alaska Native               1.2%          0.9%   −0.3 pp
    Two or more races                not separately reported  4.8%      -

He just picked the strongest predictive characteristic we have data on. You're the one trying to turn the statement into something it isn't.

I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.

We have all that data it's just significantly less predictive of outcome then race.

There is a particular set of political views associated with people who read classical languages? I fail to see what you are calling "rational" here.

Where did you come up with "Mexicans" or "intelligence"?

Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?

They grouped performance, not intelligence.

If you don't think that what happened and is happening to black people affects our average performance on tests, you haven't eliminated racist assumptions, you've eliminated the entire black experience in America and any reason for a grudge or complaint.

Grouping a list of test performances by race shouldn't lead to an assumption of natural stupidity any more than grouping a list of incomes or wealth by race should lead to an assumption of natural laziness.

And the fact that you jump to that conclusion, and it makes you nervous, so you think it's bad to talk about the facts that remind you of that conclusion, does not help black people.

You could say the same thing about Hispanic economic migrants. You don't think that economic migrants from countries with good universities and healthy middle classes are going to score lower on tests? The ones that fly in are a different story, they're often elites, but the ones that walk in? They're bottom caste where they come from, and looking for a chance to change things.

I don’t know in WALL.E they are not so dumb as they are lazy l, infact they are smart enough to do space travel at scale.

Idiocracy?

It's a major plot point in one of the books in the Bobiverse series, though it's a civilisation humanity meets instead of humanity itself (not saying anything more to avoid spoilers).

The classic version is Kornbluth's 1951 story "The Marching Morons", itself pretty clearly the basis for Idiocracy.

(You could argue that "The Time Machine" was the original example.)

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time", there's a generation ship wandering space that's a marvel of human engineering, whose inhabitants are getting dumber every generation and losing the capacity to maintain or even respect the incredible environment into which they were born. Certainly rings a bell.

Meh, the writing has been on the wall for a decade at least.

All that stupid ideas on giving passing grades to everybody in the name of equality (lol) removing admission tests to fight racism (double-lol), attention-stealing practices by social media (not lol) are now compounding with AI as a cheap service to offload thinking to.

The writing has been on the wall for years, a lot of people called that out and have been silenced.

Unironically, I would not be surprised if the kids with the best scores turned out to be the homeschooled ones.

My wild (and uneducate, don't get me wrong) guess is that in some years we'll see two groups of people succeeding: homeschooled kids (their parents kept them away from the BS) and the rich people's kids (their parent could afford a no-BS schooling).

Falling scores will not be fixed in a jiffy

If it will be fixed at all. Chances are, the generation currently in school is to be thrown away, in the sense that given how the US works, nobody's going to seriously help them.

It's just basic political math: regulations protect grift and lead to lower scores

Deregulation enables competition to naturally drive up scores

Everything's over-regulated, leading to falling scores

Simple as, all else equal

One thing that tends to get lost when we talk about the education system we have is how it was invented and what it was designed for. I mention this, because if you want to educate kids better, it's useful to consider what they system was designed for so we can design a better one. Unfortunately, the history here is somewhat more cynical and bleak than you might expect. There's an excellent book called "The Underground History Of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling"

Anyway, modern schooling was essentially designed to create excellent workers -- it was never about creating excellent individuals. At the time, the robber barons who helped invent this system along with a series of pseudo religious ideologues essentially wanted: standardized, predictable, obedient individuals without a lot of creativity. Credentials became important. Basically they wanted good consumers who don't question their station in life. (It shouldn't shock anyone that this is essentially what our current robber barons also want, although to a more extreme degree. It also shouldn't shock anyone that this is largely what we get out of the system.)

The current system was still helpful, despite it's design, I would argue mostly because of the excellent teachers that really do have kids best interests in heart. However, I really think technology has just completely broken this. I'm not sure it's a system that can be repaired, I think it's going to end up being a new system. My guess (I think it's basically already happening) is the rich will send their children to more experimental schools because they have the money, and the poor... well who cares about the poor anyway? (Sarcasm, but, I think that more or less describes the unspoken attitudes of the elites)

Nowhere in No Child Left Behind it says DEI nor it says to promote children who can’t read or pass standardized tests just so certain politicians can be appeased.

I agree it's worth looking into, potentially very emphatically. But that means doing some hard science.

That means don't just look at test scores by county, it means looking at DELTAs in test scores across time by numerous dimensions (income, poverty, did the kids get breakfast, school, etc) and an open mind to every possibility. Perhaps comparing against the parents' test scores might help elucidate.

Given the rise of so many unexplained mental health phenomena, I personally suspect there are environmental factors, but again, we need hard science and a lot of it.

The least healthiest 20% of the population. Old people use much more medical care.

to be fair if everyone was paying 10-20k less in private healthcare thorough their employer you could tax that amount

Taking care of them was historically about calorie and nutrientmaxxing. Subsidized calories have worked too well, worldwide, and there's no response to it within the current Overton window.

Being fat is a moral failing though? It’s also not portrayed that way, see the entire body positivity/healthy at every size movement.

This may be true, but I think the electorate would go fucking bananas for free GLP-1s.

Why not both? Because we’ve been “addressing on the front end” for a while without results. Making places walkable and getting (especially already obese) kids onto healthy food are things we should be doing, but need more support and take longer than a drug, which admittedly has side effects but seems healthier than waiting.

And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.

We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.

The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.

It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.

Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.

Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.

True, but GLPs in particular are obvious.

...neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.

Try the US/Iran war for size then.

I'm not sure what you mean by "completely disable their opponents" - there may not be a country on earth with enough munitions to do this against a competent and resilient adversary - the Vietnam war comes to mind where the US still lost after dropping triple the bombs (by tonnage) of what the entire allied forces dropped during WWII across all theaters

My understanding is that Russia despite falling far from its USSR days, still had multiple times more capacity to make Iskander-s, than the US can make ATACMS (and Iskanders are way better too). The PrSM, the US based successor is just about to enter volume production, and will be years till they can be made by the hundreds.

At least that was the case before Ukraine started blowing up Russian factories. And for the rest of Europe, their capacities are somehow even worse.

And in any case, Russian missiles were a drop in the bucket compared to drones.

So building high performance missiles in a volume needed for sustained conflict is not something any military has managed to do so far.

(Not shilling for any side, just my honest opinion, plz dont dogpile on this, I don't care about any side's national greatness)

"As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo."

Imagine if they had air superiority. For some reason people ignore this when analyzing the war in Ukraine. Drones are great for denial (defense). So far they are shit at assaults (offense). Also, drones don't do well in environments with military aircraft. We just don't see that in Ukraine because they are very few aircraft in the skies. The Russians haven't flown into Ukrainian airspace in over 3 years now. They launch their missiles and glide bombs from their side of the border.

Russian autocrats agree. 1.5M Russian casualties in the last 5 years(!) with an unprecedented fatality ratio, but sure, you still need the guys to go in.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rkg3wZq0cdo&ra=m

All these fancy weapons are called "force multipliers". And multiplying zero is still zero.

You still need people to occupy the place, take control of objectives, interact with the population, etc... Otherwise, you are just making craters.

An advanced army with appropriate support can make a soldier 10x more effective, but you still need a soldier to begin with.

The meat robot still has a long way to go

The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions

The robots are made to kill people on the other side until you hopefully win, otherwise political disagreements could be settled via best of 3 CoD games - or chess if you're more traditional. Recruitment of humans is still required for fodder.

The “poverty draft” narrative is old and tired and not true. The stats are 60% are from middle class, about 20% poor and 20% wealthy.

I don't think so. I think what was meant was what was literally said: that 88% of youth qualified for the military are in college.

66% of youth are not qualified for the military or college, leaving a remainder of 34% that are qualified for the military, college, or both.

X% of youth qualified for college but not the military (qualified for college here meaning attending college, I think.), leaving (34-X)%.

Of those, 88% attend college .88(34-X)%,

leaving .12(34-X)% eligible for recruitment. Which ends up a successful recruiting number like 63.5K, which is from one of the references.

I could be wrong, but it could make sense.

But also, 2/3rds of 34% also leaves a remainder of about 12% (which is a bit coincidental), so maybe what was meant to be said was that only 12% of (all American youth) are (qualified) and not (in college), rather than only 12% of (the qualified) are not (in college.)

Not to downplay the reality of the situation here, but being not qualified in this case just means not being able to walk into a recruiting office and sign a contract without a waiver. The military processes tens of thousands of waivers every year for past legal infractions, tattoo policy exemptions, medical history stuff, etc. Anyone currently taking something like ADHD medication who isn't willing to stop receiving treatment for the condition is ineligible for instance.

It's kind of asinine that one can be demonstrably stable over a long term and do all sorts of things operationally in the intelligence community, but could not even become a 92G (culinary specialist) in the Army.

America's future is delivery drivers

one out of every three people is going to be doing last mile delivery of some kind

they don't even need to be able to read english because they all ignore delivery notes, if GPS takes them off a cliff or to the wrong town they will happily follow it because they never learned to read a map

all b&m stores will go "dark warehouse"

how anyone is going to afford delivery I am not sure

but since you won't be able to afford health care or owning a home or even a car at some point, "spare cash" until you die young?

Apparently test scores are rising in England....

do we really need to blame AI ? 14+ years of reducing standards in schools, reducing discipline, allowing underperforming students to proceed and graduate, plus 30 years of changing demographics. AI isn't the primary driver here.

My kid's math curriculum has been a disaster the last couple of years. Teachers started using lesson plans from Desmos (the tech company, which I haven't figured out how exactly they're pumping out curriculum material).

Back in my day, in basic math, you'd learn a couple of concepts a day and then did 20+ problems of homework, with variations of the main themes. But the new homework style is you do 1 or 2 problems for each new concept, and then you "expand your thinking" → trick questions, gotchas, problems that combine (non-obviously) today's lesson with one from last week, things you can't answer without peeking ahead to next lesson, and so on. This style is --I imagine-- good for kids who are already very good at math. I may have enjoyed it myself. But it's shit for most students, if you never spend hardly any time ensuring that the fundamental learning sinks in before moving on.

I M M I G R A T I O N A N D G E N E T I C S

but this kind of editorializing is the precise reason I stopped subscribing.

It's filed under "leaders". It's by definition supposed to be "editorializing", because it's an editorial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial

Every time I see a "kids aee getting stupid" article, I wonder what we are missing.

I don't believe that kids are really getting stupid. I see no physiological reasons. Nutrition, pollution, substance abuse,... Not perfect but generally fine. Intellectual stimulation is high, maybe too high. Availability of information is an all time high. If anything the new generation should be smarter than we are.

And yet, it is always "kids these days are stupid". To me, it can't be right. Maybe they are indeed not as good at some tasks. But what are they good at instead? Maybe we should focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. We are judging the next generation with criteria of our own, but the world they are going to live in is not the same as ours. Maybe tests should take it into account.