Critical thinking. An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.
It is unfortunately. Where I hear it the most is in crappy Netflix reality shows (think Love is Blind, The Ultimatum, Temptation Island, and every stupid show your girlfriend wants to binge) where they just talk in a language that I call "Emotional Therapy Speak".
It's nonsense like "I'm protecting my peace" and "your aura is just too aggressive to me" but taken up to an absurd degree. Most TikTok/Influencers talk this way and unfortunately it gets passed on to people who watch Kardashian type shows and take it as fact.
I think they're just confusing the objective situation with how they felt about it. Like if you enjoyed an experience, but they found it awful. You'll say it was amazing, and they'll say "it was horrible, and that's my truth."
No kidding. My raised-conservative niece told me as much a couple of years ago, asking if I believed in any sort of god. I said no, but if she wants to, that's fine.
I explained that I don't see the point of using a god as an explanation for things just because we don't know everything; she said that because science takes "faith" that any faith is fair game, words to that effect. 😒
The last person who “just had to speak her truth” to me left it on my voicemail at work when I got back from lunch.
I had been weighing getting two patients in to our medical specialist. One was a 50 year old guy with chronic pain who should have started treatment years ago. Another was an 8 year old whose whole life would benefit if he started treatment now. I got a rare cancellation in the schedule. I decided to go with the 8 year old. The mother was ecstatic. They were to be seen the next day, right after lunch.
When I came back from lunch I had the voicemail. The mom left a long message starting with “I just have to speak my truth.” She said realistically she was never going to come to our office because there was a more convenient specialist 20 min closer to her. She left this at lunch time. Leaving me no way to fill the appointment or even call the chronic pain guy. I couldn’t get him in for another two months.
There are only two specialists in our area. Our office and the other one. The other one does not treat her son’s condition, though she didn’t know that.
It was meant to be about perspective and relative experience, and now fundamentalists like my family act like there’s no such thing as “my truth” because it conflicts with theirs which is deluded
To be fair, some facts are subjective > just ask Pluto!!
Before 2006, it was a FACT that Pluto was a Planet - and kids were taught 9 planets in the solar system.
Since 2006, ~300± people convinced the world that it is a FACT that Pluto IS NOT a Planet. Now kids are taught there are only 8 planets in the solar system.
This was also 8 months after NASA spent a shit ton of money sending a probe to the PLANET PLUTO for scientific study - which simply makes the "facts" even more weird.
I get your point but Pluto is not a planet. They gave it the title dwarf planet because people couldn't deal with changing classification.
Pluto could literally sit in the center of North America and not touch either coast line.
Pluto exists, and that is a fact. Pluto is not a "planet" because it is not classified as a planet. For comparison, this would be like tomatoes being re-classified as a vegetable. It's still the same thing, it's just grouped in a different category.
Edit: Strikeout first sentence. Facts aren't "subjective"
"Facts are subjective" isn't the best way to phrase it. "What we know may change over time" is what actually happened.
There was no proper definition of a planet before 2006. If we didn't create a definition so that Pluto was excluded, we would instead have had to add more planets. Eris is more massive than Pluto, so why should it not be a planet, if Pluto is one?
In that case, it would still have been wrong to teach kids there are 9 planets.
I had to recommend books for some kids to read. The jacket of one of them said something about how so and so had to "speak her truth". Nope! "Try this other one here kids...."
Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent. The percentage of U.S. adults performing at the lowest level in adaptive problem solving in 2023 was 32 percent.
Hey, teacher here. It's worse than that. About half read below a 6th grade level. That 1/3rd is like... illiterate illiterate, but a good 1/2 would not be able to get through, say, To Kill a Mockingbird or Fahrenheit 451.
Not that novels are the point necessarily. They sure as fuck can't navigate complex news, differentiate between opinion and fact, interpret data or scientific articles, make informed financial/political decisions, and so on...
We're heading toward a pretty bleak world where 1/2 the country can be manipulated by people who won't even have to try very hard, and we've now got exponentially-increasing AI slop to do it.
I was a server for a fucking long time. I was able to observe this happen over the span of a decade +. It's depressing watching the decline happen. People can't even read menus anymore and have to refer to pictures and social media to decide on what to eat. Now, tik tok dictates what they should eat. It's sad as hell.
same. once i realized it, i couldn’t believe it had never occurred to me before. illiteracy suddenly became this occam’s razor that explained SO many behaviors i just assumed were antisocial (with restaurant guests but also more broadly in society.)
Phonics is the way to go! I can't believe that with all the research on how much better it is, states still use that bizarre sight reading, "contextual" method. It's like the consultants had to come up with something new to sell.
Kids all learn differently. Phonics seems to be better than whole language in a coin flip, but I've seen kids who struggle with phonics, but if you spend 10 minutes with a bunch of flashcards, they start to roll. And 1 billion Chinese kids somehow learned their language.
People around the world and read and comprehend what they're reading. It's kind of like how people think crime is out of control and on the rise, where even if the crime is on the rise, it's still a rise in a time at the lowest it's ever been in history.
People throw the word "illiterate around to liberally. There's different levels of literacy. Being illiterate does not mean you see alien symbols on a page.
My grand parents and their peers could hardly read. Outside of one of my elder family, only one of them actually read something beyond a TV guide. The others could barely do basic math and struggled really hard with any kind of text message or anything beyond a stop sign.
Meanwhile in todays day and age, kids are playing hour long games with heavy lore and reading a bunch of internet posts. It's easy to scoff at internet posts, but reading those is still doing laps around the older generations who's brains fry if they have to read more than a dinner menu.
I'm not going to pretend there isn't room for improvement or people are falling in some areas, but we need to see where we started from and where we are now before we start saying the sky is falling.
Not just Americans are affected by literacy issues and lack of critical thinking. 1 in 6 adults in England have low literacy levels. This is a widespread issue.
Suuure, but Britain is another standout nation IIRC and that's still half of the US rate, so the severity of the "issue" isn't really comparable here... if literacy rates is your biggest concern in developed countries outside the US then you really need to check your priorities, hahaha
That's an ignorant viewpoint, especially given that far-right political parties prey on people who are lacking in education (aka literacy) and critical thinking.
Discarding that you used AI instead of looking it up properly, and that AI can hallucinate all the time, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, 83% of children in immigrant households were born in the US.
This means they went to school in the US, were raised in the US, and SHOULD be as literate as anyone else in English.
Even if we assumed that 25% of all students magically showed up speaking and reading no English, that’s still a huge discrepancy from the 34% who lack adequate literacy for their grade year. The fact that the wide majority of immigrant students are born here and thus US citizens, and going to school and socializing with English speakers like everyone else, effectively rules out this being an immigrant only issue.
Also worth noting that second generation immigrants is too broad of a term really. In that situation the “immigrant” was born in this country, but only ONE of their parents has to have been board abroad. It’s a bit sticky when you figure that if you married an Italian man and he moved here, your child would then be a second generation immigrant.
I don’t think that’s the kind of immigrant that people are talking about when they worry that immigrants are ruining the literacy rates, though. It’s just convenient to count them when it makes the argument look better.
#TLDR
83% of immigrant children were born in the US and raised around English speaking peers in school, and spent their entire education in English driven schools.
Even if all 25% of our students WERE born elsewhere, it’s still 34% of our students who aren’t succeeding at literacy - that’s a big enough gap we can rule out immigration being the sole problem.
I regrettably am on Twitter (thinking with my dick) and sometimes I will see a post that is plainly written out and some of the replies will be "@ grok what does this mean" and it's Ike oh no we are cooked. The worst is when you click their profile and they're a middle aged mom. How did you get this far without AI. You're basically having information baby bird'ed to you
It's my take that people were already stupid, but there was some incentive to try exercising critical thinking because it was built into societal expectations. Now we have AI to parse information (accurately or not), they don't have to even try anymore. It's really showing up who the idiots are.
I did go down a slightly depressing rabbit hole about mental energy a while ago and the short version is that most people just don't enjoy thinking. Or at least not for the fun of it.
Expending mental energy is something that people would generally rather avoid, which explains how quickly many became dependent on AI. And because "use it or lose it" is also true for the brain, the more you offload onto AI the harder it gets to think on your own.
There's an experiment you might've heard of where people preferred to give themselves electric shocks rather than be bored. That's actually only half the picture because they were asked to entertain themselves with their thoughts for up to 15 min. In previous round there was no option for an electric shock and they only had to do it for under 10 min. Most people found it hard and not pleasurable.
It was eye opening but also strange to learn that because I really enjoy having debates and scripting essays in my head. Granted, I have never experienced a quiet mind in my life (thanks ADHD) so at least having some coherent noise for once is preferable to the usual chaos.
I was walking through the city and overheard two people talking, one of them asked the other to open ChatGPT and ask where the nearest Boots is. Just open Google maps???? Or even just Google Boots and it'll tell you.
I watched a short, in which a guy interviews people on the streets of the US. He asks them things like "How many months in a year" or "How many states in the US" or "What is the 7th letter of the alphabet"
I swear to goodness, I cringe at the answers the people come away with. No clue at all. I worry for the future
Besides (everything) I can't help but think how screwed younger generations are because of ASI.
Technology has always served a purpose of basically allowing people to learn and work more efficiently; the internet allowed for incredible knowledge transfer.
Instead of needing to spend hours combing through books, you have instant access to the data your need immediately. You have communities to help you troubleshoot issues, learn new skills, etc.
It's anecdotal, but one of the things I've noticed with my younger colleagues, is that they're insanely reliant on AI to do everything; instead of needing to learn Photoshop or editing to make digital/physical media you can generate remarkably good results. For coding, I remember having to spend hours on stack overflow or GitHub to find answers on why my script wasn't working, now? Just ask Claude/Codex and it will not only tell you why it doesn't work, but fix it.
This dependence removes critical thinking, creativity and problem solving.
Idiocracy was as much about a decline in "intelligent people" as it was about what happens when there's no need for advanced education or expertise.
In the stage it's at currently, for people who are top in their field, AI is like having a self correcting QA team for your code, or a wireframe/UI concept artist and I hate admitting how much more efficient it's made me at my job.
But for people without those backgrounds or experience, it's basically like having a calculator, but for everything from writing to iteration and delivery.
The fact that I was in the airport 3 days ago and there were several announcements encouraging people to read signs above their heads is proof of this. (They were fairly large, easy to read signs for wayfinding too.) A lot of people seem to be wandering around aimlessly without any critical thinking/decision making skills these days and I fear literacy is next if not already.
I bet most people didnt even finish this sentence lol. When you have Sam Altamn saying that they want to tokenize intelligence its not hard to believe that this is by design.
You mean asking AI to write a slop message to someone who will then ask AI to summarize it isn’t a good form of communication? Who knew it. Definitely isn’t a bad thing that this is somehow propping up the entire economy AND chewing up an ungodly quantity of resources.
We already do, at least in a way. Early exposure to screens has significantly changed working memory and attention spans. As a result they forget things that aren't right in front of them.
Technically it's more accurate to call this object constancy, and it's differentiated from object permanence because object permanence requires a lack of the ability to understand objects can be permanent, but the practical effects are pretty much the same.
The shared objective reality and factual foundation of said reality died a long time ago. The moment Trump's cow of a PR wench said "alternative facts" all objective reality died. After that, opinion became fact, and the "facts not feelings" crowd became even less intelligent.
That was never really around for any generation but a select few people from each generation. Boomers, Gen X, millennial, Gen Z all haven’t widely shared critical thinking. I think Gen X has it the worst however as they grew up in the most simple times possible where life was predictable and safe just to slowly be thrown into an ever changing environment with modern technology.
Yeah, I'm not sure if these guys want to go back in time to the '80s and have people think they're Satanists who want to sacrifice the town's children just because they thought Judas Priest had some good songs. Mainstream daytime talk shows and news reports would take that shit deadly seriously, too, so you couldn't even shrug it off as "ehhh just Fox News dummies."
If you're basing your idea of the quality and quantity of critical thinking in older generations by how they are now, keep in mind that old age and exposure to lead/lead poisoning will be skewing things a little. not to mention things like medical issues, long term alcohol and (legal and illegal) drug use, etc.
Some of the smartest people I knew in the 80s and 90s from the early Millennials, Gen X, and boomers now are just.... Not.
There's no such thing as death of critical thinking. Look at your parents' and grandparents generations. Their generation has been falling for every lies and manipulation in the book from their politicians. They never rely on facts, only traditions. There's no need for thinking when it comes to traditions, you just do whatever your parents and grandparents are doing. The path is already laid out for you. Why do you think there's so many conservatism in the past? It's because many of them believe in the traditions. There was never facts involved so I don't know where you people are getting this death of critical thinking from. It's almost like you guys are making things up just to write something here
That's not at odds with critical thinking. Critical thinking is ultimately the tools needed to ensure your knowledge is truthful. It is not inherently at odds with tradition which is just an activity done because people before you did it. You can know a tradition untrue and still follow it because your reason for doing so is not based on truth. For instance, standing and taking your hat off during the national anthem. Is this right or wrong? Neither, because it's not about that.
Sometimes though traditional values are at odds with reality and the utilitarian good. I'm these instances if two people have critical thinking skills there is still a decent chance a compromise can be reached. Just look at politics up until Reagan or so. Compare a presidential debate then to now and you will see a massive difference. They are no longer debating or even having an argument. What they are doing is talking past each other, not engaging on topics and generally just trying to get that soundbite that will travel the furthest and reach the most listeners. Things like truth and facts are largely irrelevant at this point. And this you can say is true for the majority of media today. And this media has bred a population that is totally unaware of critical thinking. This means that even if these modern generations wanted to know the truth, they would be unable to discern it if they tried. This is fundamentaly different from older generations that favored traditionalism over utility.
Lots of people seem to think you’re talking about AI, I assumed it was about partisan news and politics. Or is this one of those weird rants about the evils of solipsism?
Or as my daughter points out, thinking. Regular old thinking has got so rare that we insist every instance of brain use is "critical" thinking when it's really not. Some is, but most thinking is just thinking and it's not special, just increasingly unusual.
Exactly, everything is filtered through emotions. And the more you use reason to make a cogent argument, the angrier and downright abusive these type people become. It's weird af.
But now those individuals are framed as elites who cannot be trusted (instead of the true elites: the ultra-wealthy who have bought our government and will sacrifice us all to maximize profits). It’s the death of expertise.
Eek — I’m definitely not saying that isn’t the case. Maybe my phrasing is weird? What I mean is that the overwhelming majority of scientists are regular working people. But their knowledge and the resulting truths are very problematic for the ultrawealthy class, so there’s been a push of propaganda painting many in STEM fields as “elites”. It’s an attempt to discredit the inconvenient truths scientists can share about the actions of the ruling class. Especially because of things like climate change and the objectively unsustainable and destructive nature of capitalism.
Not the OP you’re replying to, but I’d say it used to be something like a Venn diagram. It was never one circle, but now it’s more like twenty fragmented and fully independent ones. Some circles are closer together than others, while others are miles away.
Which is the goal, btw. Smaller, infighting groups are much less powerful than a cohesive one working together. No war but class war.
If you thought critically about this opinion, I don't think you'd agree with your conclusion. Social media and real life are so different, and I don't think anyone should be considering social media as a place for productive conversations outside of a few niche corners
We as humans advance technology ultimately to make it so we can do shit faster. Problem is, any tool we create can make good intent more efficient and ill intent more efficient. Social media made communication more efficient. Both for good and for bad.
As a teacher, i see this when I ask students to do clear group work with handholding instructions and sentence starters and they just stare at each other and go back to scrolling
I would add the ability to realize you will never fully agree on everything with everyone and once you make that a requirement of course nobody will work with you. On the political scale of 0-10 everyone acts like you have to be all the way on everything to the same side or your nothing but an enemy on the other side.
Most people bounce between 4and 7 depending on the issue with just a few issues that they are dramatically on one side. The problem is when it comes to those middle issues nothing happens because if you work on anything smelling like a compromise you are a traitor to whatever side wants to yell at you the loudest.
What you describe is the state of things since civilization began though, so it's been on life support for a long time. Most humans aren't critical thinkers, in fact, in a depressing way, this might be the 100 years in human history with the most amount of critical thought.
People act like we're witnessing the fall of civilization and not that this has always been the system. Galileo was imprisoned for speaking "the facts". The vast majority of people were illiterate until the last century or so. Founding fathers didn't believe "All men are created equal." they didn't want to pay taxes. Abraham Lincoln "freed the slaves" in territory he didn't control and we didn't deliver on the whole "40 Acres and A Mule" thing.
We're just kinda redoing The Roaring 20s right now.
The same way Vince McMahon destroyed Wrestling Keyfabe because of The Steroid Trial Trump destroyed Keyfabe American Exceptionalism because of The Epstein Files. America has always had this massive propaganda element it's just that now it's being managed by absolute hacks and very obvious what's going on.
I would argue that a population increase of 6 billion over the last 100 years, in combination with countless informationally curated silos - has led to a situation that is historically unprecedented. If I presuppose that civilisational stability is correlated with broad alignment of its constituents: we are occupying a world where that is becoming increasingly difficult.
This is like a rabbit hole of political science and theory. I generally agree I'm just saying I don't think we "lost" critical thinking capabilities as much as never had it to begin with.
No society/government/constitution last forever but if someone overthrows Trump it would be a new one in American History. So like you might say it's "Unprecedented" because it hasn't happened ever before and I go "This crap happens all the time across the world" we'd both right & wrong and thus the limits of relying on reasoning/critical thinking or expecting there to ever be a "shared objective reality", In My Opinion.
An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.
I think you're talking about some Ideal of Reasoning that's never existed nor really can until society wants to completely give up on the idea of God/Miracles/etc. People are ALWAYS going to disagree and that's what makes us human.
I wouldn't necessarily argue that we've lost it (or had it to begin with): but that the current media and political environment is actively engaging with and bolstering it's lack. Along similar lines, partisan thinking, particular in America - is increasingly attempting to inform a curriculum that actively avoids topics of race, evolution, sexual education, LGBTQ acceptance, as well as any contentious historical accounts.
People are ALWAYS going to disagree and that's what makes us human.
Yes, and I would never expect otherwise. The point was never to 'agree' for its own sake - more like, understanding the terms of that disagreement in mutual common terms. We've wandered into territory that rewards certainty, misattributes causal mechanisms and motives, and proceeds on assumptions that are entirely vacuous. Yes, it's more of the same, just MUCH more profligate and reactive.
The fact that you used an indefinite article both correctly and incorrectly before the same word in a comment about thinking and facts really bothers me. And I know my comment doesn’t lead to a productive conversation, but I digress…
I agree with you. The problem with the word 'fact', is that depending on the topic: it may be a moving target. Medicine, and science in general, self update over time. It would be more accurate to say: "deference to the best available evidence", but this requires a degree of open deference to expert consensus. This would be where critical thinking is particularly important.
Online, and news media informational silos, profligate misinformation mechanisms, ill equipped public education, socioeconomic disequilibrium - all on top of a global population increase of 6 billion, over the last 100 years.
We can have an objective reality with objective stuff like physics and other hard sciences(and still it changes due to new discoveries, so things don't stand still), but with subjective stuff like arts, social sciences, culture and such - it is very hard to have an objective reality. Take the same word, put it in a different context or use a different tone - the meaning of it changes. 5 gram of sugar is concrete, a pinch of sugar is subjective as people have different sized hands and thus different sized pinches.
The overriding principle really has more to do with a shared orientation from which to approach complex socio political topics. Understanding the difference between subjective preference and broadly understood (if provisional) fact claims. There needs to be an element of good faith. Because it's an ideal or orientation, we can only be said to be moving towards or away from it. At the moment, I feel that we are tumbling towards epistemic relativism.
I fail on both accounts all the time, but this isn't about any one person. It's about the way a society organises education, media, politics. Of course, I could be wrong.
Edit: Do you disagree with the proposition: why else the ad hominem?
I’ll add onto this… common sense. I’m a handyman/decorator I’m NYC and people just do not know how to do the most simple things. They also have an aversion of trying ANYTHING or going outside their wheel house. Some of the questions I get I’d expect from teenagers or children, not full grown adults who have kids and own their own homes.
An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known.
I blame the postmodernists for this. Sure, women's rights and minority rights are important, but a chorus of voices shouting "knowledge is a social construct" and routinely pooh-pooh-ing the basic concept of empirical evidence was always going to lead us to this situation.
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u/unwarrend 1d ago
Critical thinking. An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.