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We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively cap

We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...

maerF0x0 8mo ago
Also we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.
- wasntitlower 8mo ago
  I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I might be wrong, and I don't want to necessarily google "is X happening" because that looks like it yields articles that affirm it, and I don't know what a trustworthy source would be. Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
  - sapphicsnail 8mo ago
    > I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.
  - DauntingPear7 8mo ago
    There was an article that interviewed a film prof at my current uni and he said that students nowadays can’t understand or answer very simple questions about the plot of a film, despite being film majors
- npunt 8mo ago
  Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them. And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
  - maerF0x0 8mo ago
    I haven't dug into the gritty details of the article and the testing, but it's easily conceivable that "read" means Shakespeare, "Write" means fiction, and math means ... well actually pretty much all math is important :lol: As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction. Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
    - npunt 8mo ago
      I think you vastly underestimate the importance of fiction. Fiction may be the best canvas for creative and abstract thought, the place where possibility is explored and the 'what' and 'why' is established, without being mired in details. Before we invented things, we thought of things to invent, and in those moments we were writing fiction. Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.
      - maerF0x0 8mo ago
        Fair about fiction... I just don't feel the same way about outdated fiction..
        npunt 8mo ago
        Yeah there’s balances to be struck. Tho I would push back a bit on the notion of great works being outdated. Think of them more as having survived the gauntlet of time, crushing generation after generation of newer writing with their undeniable superiority, emerging as the strongest and most adaptable ideas & stories that couldn’t be stopped even by the churn of centuries of change in language, culture, ideologies, wars and more. Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight. This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.
muyuu 8mo ago
they failed to account for the fact that very similar effects are happening around the world in places where no investment was made to bring laptops to schools these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has
carefree-bob 8mo ago
Yeah, it seems really odd to be blaming laptops.

We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...

maerF0x0 8mo ago

Also we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.

wasntitlower 8mo ago
I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I might be wrong, and I don't want to necessarily google "is X happening" because that looks like it yields articles that affirm it, and I don't know what a trustworthy source would be. Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
- sapphicsnail 8mo ago
  > I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.
- DauntingPear7 8mo ago
  There was an article that interviewed a film prof at my current uni and he said that students nowadays can’t understand or answer very simple questions about the plot of a film, despite being film majors
npunt 8mo ago
Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them. And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
- maerF0x0 8mo ago
  I haven't dug into the gritty details of the article and the testing, but it's easily conceivable that "read" means Shakespeare, "Write" means fiction, and math means ... well actually pretty much all math is important :lol: As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction. Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
  - npunt 8mo ago
    I think you vastly underestimate the importance of fiction. Fiction may be the best canvas for creative and abstract thought, the place where possibility is explored and the 'what' and 'why' is established, without being mired in details. Before we invented things, we thought of things to invent, and in those moments we were writing fiction. Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.
    - maerF0x0 8mo ago
      Fair about fiction... I just don't feel the same way about outdated fiction..
      - npunt 8mo ago
        Yeah there’s balances to be struck. Tho I would push back a bit on the notion of great works being outdated. Think of them more as having survived the gauntlet of time, crushing generation after generation of newer writing with their undeniable superiority, emerging as the strongest and most adaptable ideas & stories that couldn’t be stopped even by the churn of centuries of change in language, culture, ideologies, wars and more. Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight. This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.

muyuu 8mo ago

they failed to account for the fact that very similar effects are happening around the world in places where no investment was made to bring laptops to schools these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has

carefree-bob 8mo ago

Yeah, it seems really odd to be blaming laptops.