Students have always been stupid. The only thing that changes is the reason. It used to be newspapers. Then comic books. Now Google. The hand-wringing and mora

Students have always been stupid. The only thing that changes is the reason. It used to be newspapers. Then comic books. Now Google. The hand-wringing and moral panic are always talked up by innumerates who have neither measured the purported decline in student capabilities nor adduced any reason as to why the technology in question creates the purported affect--at least, they never give any reasons that go beyond pandering to the prejudices of their own generation. Generally, technology improves intellectual capabilities. Newspapers informed. Comic books introduce young people to stories they might not have encountered otherwise. Texting improves literacy (what else would you expect from a technology that allows young people to carry on complex social lives entirely via the written word?) and the kind of transparent access to a diversity of information sources that Google provides increases a wide range of intellectual capabilities by giving students access to actual facts to think about, rather than the completely useless contents of their imagination. It is true, as the article says, that certain formerly-important skills will be lost, and the type of mistake we used to make will be replaced by a new type of mistake. But are the new types of mistake more frequent (unlikely, and not mentioned) or more severe (also unlikely, also not mentioned) than the old types of mistake? Strangely, anti-Bayesian articles like this one never even try to do a proper accounting of the number of old-type mistakes avoided by the technology, focusing entirely--and misleadingly--on the types of mistake enabled by the new technology. This is lazy, dishonest and misleading. To put it another way, work-processing has had a terrible effect on typing accuracy, but who cares?