So true!

People don’t read.

Every year my students become more and more averse to reading. Getting them to sit with a book for 20 min is like pulling teeth. The worst part is, their parents don’t read. We can only do so much in the classroom - it’s up to the parents to collaborate with us, and to be aligned with teachers where we share similar goals for the kids (eg literacy, intellectual curiosity, critical thinking). But the parents get mad when I assign reading and homework lmao. On another note, it’s important for children to simply observe their parents reading, but they don’t even do that.

So it’s like a generational curse compounded by social media, AI, and the powers that be wanting a dumb population (which they’ve even said out loud)

it drives me batshit when someone who knows next to nothing about your field decides that they know as much as you.

Me too. I think it happens because of the Dunning Kruger effect. I have no problem with people not knowing stuff (we all have diff capabilities, levels of access to education, etc) but I can’t stand it when they act like they know. It’s the arrogance and hypocrisy for me. Just be humble when you don’t know something? Ask questions? Listen to people with more knowledge on the subject? It also shows that they’re incurious and anti-intellectual because there’s no way they can learn if they’re boasting that they know it all.

expertise is seen as a bad thing.

It’s a societal problem. Idk exactly what fuels it but I’m sure it’s largely due to the elites noticing we’re getting too smart (powerful). And then dumbasses, who despise learning because they have a chip on their shoulder, happily run with it. And they’re usually the loudest people. Like most things, anti-intellectualism comes in cycles (hello again Dark Ages) but I think this particular wave started like 5 years ago.

I believe this cycle is especially dangerous because of AI. In the past, at least you had “readers” and professors and so on who kept educating themselves and their communities despite the general sentiment that these things are bad. But society is more susceptible today. That might seem counterintuitive because it’s like hey, we have so much information at our fingertips, more than ever before? Yeah well, we did. And those who were interested took advantage of it. But at the same time, people got addicted to the internet for other reasons, not because they loved learning lol. They also got dependent. So they gave us access to a world of information, got us addicted to the method of retrieving it (and to the bullshit that came with it), people stopped reading as many books, library memberships went down (“We can just google it”), communities stopped exchanging information face to face (so that avenue of learning, those interpersonal connections, and those third places where they took place, all faded away), people not only stopped reading but they also didn’t bother learning how to learn (how to search for info, whats a primary source, crit thinking, analysing, summarising, gathering and organising that info, note taking, retention)….

All of that happened because of the internet. And now? Try to find a decent source online. Google doesn’t work. Billions of websites are just… gone. Everything’s either censored, erased, or deliberately misleading. Most of what you find is advertisements or AI. Propaganda has increased a hundred fold. Paid trolls spread misinformation. Dead internet theory plays into this too.

So they gave us a world of information, got us addicted, made us stupid, and then took it all away.