apocalyptic brain drain¶

People have been predicting apocalyptic brain drain about everything from the internet to mass media to books themselves. Always with the same fear, that people have stopped thinking for themselves, that having everything fed to them is ruining their critical thinking, etc. https://t.co/PlMqkkXhC0 The number of people confidently asserting "Ummm, people HAVE been getting dumber!" kind of demonstrates my point that you don't need AI to be stupid. No critical analysis, no evidence, no definition of terms, etc. Just vibes. How are you defining stupidity? How are measuring it? What data are you using to demonstrate its supposed rise? How are you linking it with adoption of AI, social media, internet, mass media, or other variables? How are you controlling for outside variables? Not a single source for this frankly unfalsifiable claim. Without so much as a definition of "stupid," all you actually have is "People feel dumber now," on an anecdotal level, and you can't even do that properly, because you don't have context: you aren't even 100 years old!