• boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    I wonder what the numbers are for other countries. I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school’s over. Atrophy of the brain.

    Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world. But it still feels like there are a LOT of idiots with no critical thinking skills, no functional reading ability, etc.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school’s over. Atrophy of the brain.

      You move from an environment that’s constantly challenging and stressing your brain muscles to an environment that asks you to do the same repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. I think the most glaring example of this is the recent tendency towards “Vibes Coding”.

      How AI Vibe Coding Is Erasing Developers’ Skills

      One developer on Hacker News mentioned this perfectly: “For a while, I barely bothered to check what Claude was doing because the code it generated tended to work on the first try. But now I realize I’ve stopped understanding my own codebase.”

      This is the trap. The AI works so well initially that you stop paying attention. You stop learning. You stop thinking. And by the time you realize what’s happened, your skills have already degraded significantly.

      And since most of the US syndicated news publications and entertainment fiction deliberately publish at a 6th grade level… that’s the level people tend to operate at for the rest of their adult lives.

      Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world.

      I mean, 6th grade reading is literate. It’s not as though 6th graders can’t read. They just don’t have the advanced language skills you’d need to survive a college course on Proust or whatever.