No, but we are getting there.
Yeah, but probably not for the reasons this article pointed out.
The golden age of having to hear from stupid people.
where’s that Kylo Ren MORE! meme at…
Obviously.
AI is also putting pressure on the ability to have multiple, independent sources by diverting traffic away from those sites. Just like reddit kills independent phpbb boards, AI will (and is) killing critical thought.
Oh that’s been going on way before AI became a thing
Yes but this has accelerated it. I dont actually read anything anymore. I just ask chat gpt. In the end, it will make me dependent on it. And so many people will go that route, for different reasons.
Doing a web search now feels like wasting a lot of time when chat gpt has the answer already.
I think this is already changing everything. School system, education, learning, jobs, careers, etc.
I never ask these bots because they are all the time wrong enough to not be useful for me.
I don’t need construction advice which gets one of the mentioned materials completely wrong. I don’t need technical advice that invents syntax and libraries. I don’t need mathematical advice that produces formulae with errors. It’s even worse that you have to look very attentively before you’ll notice that error.
It doesn’t feel like something new, though, more like return to badly machine-translated texts or those with breaking typos found in search engines in year 2003. And even generated, by Markov chains or by mentally ill humans or whatever. Remember when “googling” meant checking 20+ pages of results and that was normal.
I don’t know why a tool for quick wrong answers is so popular. I can make up quick wrong answers too. I use the Internet for trying to find correct answers.
Because its often correct.
I blame google. Seriously.
I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.
But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.
Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.
So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.
It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
People have made that joke since the movie came out. Bit every year that passes idiocracy looks like the good ending.
Yeah but Trump and Musk are showing the worst behavior of humanity in front of the entire planet. That scene in idiocracy with the president could easily be Trump or Musk. So I dont know if its a joke anymore.
There is no attempt to be a good person, have any morals, any shame… In fact, its the opposite of those things that make money and creates infamous individuals that get all the attention.
So its logical to assume that this path will continue, where any attention is great because it makes money through ads connected to what people are watching.
Of course we could say that humanity should not pay attention to this. That worked while the people doing the bad things were just celebrities. Now we have presidents and billionaires doing those things. Its affecting everyone what they say or do.
I think its easy to get a general sense of dread from observing all this. Many feel like the world has gone crazy. But its more that these specific people are getting the attention, or rather, taking it.
I have a book titled “Generation Doof” (Generation Stupid), and yes, this book got it right.
I’m afraid that most people under 30 would simply cease to function if the internet suddenly went away.
you would cease to function if electricity suddenly went away.
Not really, sorry. Only problem would be the freezers.
Many people would, but I think I could rig something to have a sufficient amount of power in the house.
I can still read books and manuals, and i do have those books and manuals in paper form.
You don’t realize how hard it is to do physically the work of water pumps in the grid, which allow you to have running water. Or to collect firewood (or some other burnable fuel) to use much of it every damn day for cooking, heating water, heating your habitat.
And the water will have unbalanced composition, so things you are getting from almost any findable water you’ll have to get specifically. Imagine a water supply short on lithium, but with horrible concentrations of iron, or something like that.
I am well aware of that. But that was not the original topic.
and you think youre special? most people who cant read shit on paper cant read it on the internet. “reading books, and manuals in paper format” doesnt take that much brain power
I’ve noticed no one has books anymore though. I used to be able to go to peoples houses, look at their bookcase, and learn lots about them. No one has bookcases full of books on display anymore except really old people. Even our library has been mostly emptied and has maybe a fifth of the number of books it used to have. I have no idea where all those book went.
Point is that most people who read on Internet have not the experience to do somthing without Internet since they never lived without internet.
Writes the one who has learned grammar in Twitter school.
you would cease to function if oxygen suddenly went away.
if youre trying to argue, you just proved my point.
Seems you already lost some oxygen supply
It’s only a golden age insofar as a golden shower is golden
Since this article is regarding USA, it’s worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
I’d say exterminating natives was good enough as a warning sign and some more.
The American Dream has given way to the American Schizophrenic Psychotic Episode.
We can only hope it stays just an episode.
It not only gave way, it actually paved the way.
Brainwashing about American individual freedom ideals, have become idolization of billionaire sociopaths as the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.deleted by creator
Worse than, say, the dark ages?
“Dark Ages” comes from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars saying, “Thank God we’re so smart. Those people were morons.”
Also, it was after Rome really fell apart, darker times then the Empire certainly.
darker times then the Empire certainly.
Not really.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn’t spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren’t going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it’d still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you’re like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i’m romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you’re french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren’t here to stay…
Maybe þere are repeatedly recurring golden ages?
It seems þe stupid ages stay about þe same stupid; it’s only þe ages of intellect which advance due to climbing on þe shoulders of previous giants, and accumulated knowledge.
Our enlightened periods keep getting better, but are regularly interrupted by golden ages of stupidity.
Everything is cyclical. Funny reading people on here acting like it’s the end of the world. No, they just haven’t lived through the end of a cycle. Gotta admit, the West had a hella run since WWII.
Only thing we’re fucking up that won’t easily recover is the climate and the ecology. (Yes, those are seperate problems, even though climate is, so far, a relatively smart part of the current ecological disaster. The BIG chunk of that is human activities.)
Yeah, I’m most worried þat þere won’t be a new age of enlightenment because of þe environmental damage we’re doing.
Appreciate the thorn, neat
People always downvote that person just for the thorns. I dunno. I can read, it takes one sentence for my brain to compensate and roll with it. I think it’s kinda neat as well.
Can you explain how I was supposed to read that ‘thorn’ first time ive encountered it.
I’m starting to believe natural selection didn’t just get us to where we are, it kept us here.
The genetic variation in the human brain will lead to more and more good and bad variations generation after generation. Stupidity used to have deadly consequences, now it’s just poverty (or the White House).
Our society wants to be inclusive and accepting and liberating and safe, but what if that just doesn’t work with our current make? What if these mild deviations and mutations only progress forwards when the weak traits perish? We don’t have that mechanism anymore so weak and dangerous personality traits persist and continue to vote.
It’s a scary thought, but I can’t see anything wrong with the logic, especially observing how it’s taking hold across the globe.
It is not genetic, USA is not an old enough country to have had any significant genetic evolution.
It is instead as Richard Dawkins has described Memetic.
Americans have a tradition of being extremely proud of being free, this feature has been advertised as the most significant thing about USA to Americans to a degree that is akin to brainwashing.
While freedom admittedly is a good thing, the way Americans praise it religiously has turned out to be toxic.
Because sociopathy is now seen as the ultimate expression of individual freedom, so sociopathy is widely admired as a virtue.
This combined with how sociopathy is often rewarded economically, because exploiting people and grabbing all the money for yourself is considered being smart, and the #2 thing religiously praised in USA is money that also reward sociopathic behavior.This is all about social standards, and the values of society, and has nothing to do with evolutionary shortcomings.
That said, the way some people here claim you are pushing eugenics is completely baseless.But contrary to your thinking, it seems to me that evolution favor the intelligent more now than it ever did. The demands to intelligence to do well in society are ever increasing, and doing well is an advantage when wanting to have children.
I’m starting to lose hope in the progress of humanity at all. I am pretty sure we wont solve our critical problems. We just arent capable of doing so as a group. And we will keep bombing and burning until the planet cant sustain itself any longer. We are not really progressing in our social infrastructure and philosophies at all-- we might as well be humans from 5000 years ago, only sedentary, holding iphones and bathed in chemicals all day.
There is a social media aspect to this. We have amplified the worst behaviors and reenforced them with monetary gains. We broke the incentive structure in America where being a doctor was the highest calling. The media is also incentivized to spew division, we’ve basically made money the greatest reward in society, and only award it to the worst people. Its a really effective way to skew the sociopathic tendencies of the masses.
Frankly, between blaming welfare and going for eugenics or blaming capitalism and going for socialism I’d much prefer the latter.
Does blame itself matter though? Can we steer opinions with such a thing and make real change or is that ability an illusion, and blame a …verbal masturbation?
I’d argue it does. You can’t improve things if you don’t first identify what the root cause of the problem is.
Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels
You only have one pair of torn boots, patched shirt and patched trousers, you probably have no underwear too (let alone a few changes of it), have scars all around, only a handful of teeth, much of your hair white, dry skin.
You sleep in some boarding house, or more likely in a hammock at the factory.
You are hungry first half of the day and a bit less hungry and a bit drunk the second half. Oh, I forgot - you likely already have a few such injuries.
You generally don’t keep money, it all goes to keep you alive for one more day. Sometimes you don’t have work and sleep under some bridge. The border between a worker and a homeless person is fuzzy.
A-and you are not very literate. You get a look of a newspaper or two from time to time.
Most of what you get to read is socialist political agitation, which is kinda fine. But - all that activity doesn’t happen at work. You’ll lose your bread, that little you get, if you do that. Political assemblies happen at night with torches (hence the traditions of some old parties, not limited to fascist ones).
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
Oh for fucks sake with the strawman arguments. u/freedom never stated anything indicating support for eugenics. But apart from that you are totally wrong about the social Darwinism, it’s just not genetic but Memetic as Richard Dawkins has defined it, bad ideals spreading like disease. As in the idolization of personal freedom and money resulting in idolization of sociopathy as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.
So u/freedom was more right than you, it’s just not genetics driving this problem, it’s cultural insanity.What intelligence level on average do you need to be empathetic? Humans are a social creature because being in a community has survival utility. Individually we lose something, but gain in aggregate. Empathy is intelligence. And natural selection and outlining a hypothesis isn’t eugenics. You’ll note that no where in my comment did I advocate for this or even insinuate it.
The connection to eugenics is on you and your thoughts.
Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.
Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.
Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.
Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?
You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.
Empathy is most definitely a very significant aspect of human intelligence, just because it isn’t measured in your standard IQ test doesn’t mean it isn’t. Scoring high on an IQ test doesn’t necessarily mean you are very intelligent, it only means you are good at recognizing the type of patterns used in the test.
No rule applies 100% of the time. Understanding that putting good into the world can improve your environment beyond easily identified individual gains is an intelligent concept likely surfacing from group survival, not individual conscious thought.
Imagine you’re born into a world where 1 out of every 100 people is a socio/psychopath and 10 are (to use your terms) less knowledgeable and prone to manipulation of behavior.
Low socioeconomic status is likely to grow for the subset of 10ths that keeps growing exploited under the less ethical influence of the 1s. Low socioeconomic status is linked to having more offspring, which slowly grows the “10s” to higher and higher relative percentage of the population.
Identifying this mechanism and being concerned for the implications as related to life’s adaptation ability, is certainly controversial, but not eugenics. Eugenics is intentional, this hypothetical just a natural process. The thought of people perishing without recourse is the scary part. I never proposed it needed to run its course “because”, just that it might be too late to stop it now. To be eugenics flavored, I argue intent is necessary. Again, not advocating, just acknowledging it may be unavoidable.
A casual eugenics supporter.
That’s a conclusion you pulled out your ass, and is not supported in what he writes.
You’re the one bringing up eugenics buddy. Reading comprehension: the long lost art.
Yes. Next question.
It’s fake gold spray paint.
That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Nope, humans have always been stupid. People said the same shit when the printing press was invented, or TV, or whatever.
Seriously, crack a history book. Modern times are actually pretty good, even with all the bullshit.
Humans have always been stupid but today technology has made it easier for the dumbest among us to be more influential than any stupid person of any prior era. This, we are in the golden age of stupidity.
It’s pretty good compared to, say, 100 years ago. But is it better than, idk, 10 years ago? This is highly dependent where you live, of course. But, in the US, I can 100% say life was better a decade ago and people weren’t outright rejecting intellectualism en masse.
The idiots didn’t have their own eco chamber. As an unfortunate byproduct of the social media they realised how many of them there are and organised themselves.
I wish they had an eco chamber! Their echo chamber is vehemently against that, though.
54, American here. Yeah, I think we peaked in the 80s and 90s after a small setback in the 70s. Through 2010 was pretty good as well except for 9/11 fucking up our politics and legislation.
I’d agree the US peaked in the 90s. 2008 really fucked us for almost a decade, though. Economy had essentially recovered by 2014/2015sh until COVID. I’m almost 40, so most of my adult life has been plagued by crisis after crisis.
Quite my last tech support job in 2007, hated it, ready to move up. Didn’t score another IT role for 7 years, hated the job I was in.
Yep, as long as we don’t change/better ourselves on fundamental/cognitive level, the result will always be the same. Can’t make the play field better if the ground rules are broken. Most systems today are shaped by excusing violence and injustice. Violence is violence, no matter what.
With that said, lately americans seem like a new insane kind of stupid.
New media indeed coincides with revolutions. I disagree with your final assessment. We have yet to see how this turn of new media plays out.
Good or bad is a relative. The frame of reference should be contemporary. Just because we ostensibly have technological luxuries not mean things are going well right now. Authoritarianism on another up cycle.
We are living through idiots revenge.
i mean there was the whole Dark Ages thing.
We’re well on our way to Dark Ages 2: Electric Q-galoo
That’s all mostly propaganda from the Renaissance and the nineteenth century.
Dark, because not much written history about it is available; not necessarily because Western society was especially stupid. Maybe it was, but we can’t know because how few records remain.
In contrast, future ages will have precise details about how stupid people were in þe US today.
Also, add this:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20014496
I meant to say your first part there and forgot. :) So, THREE reasons the times were called thus.
Wouldn’t the golden age be the formation of all religions?
God no. Are you joking?
Religions are the absolute bane of human philosophy. Its prepackaged bundles of ideas that no one is allowed to challenge. Most religions are basically ridiculous and easily proved false. They serve to control. All of them were written by flawed people from long ago, and it shows.
The meaning of all writing is based on the time it exists in. Whats in the bible (and Koran, and Talmud) today doesnt mean what it meant two thousand years ago, and even then it was probably sketchy. Now its worse and getting more irrelevant all the time. But say that out loud in any setting except an anonymous internet chatroom, and everyone shuns you, at best.
