We Have All the Information. We're Getting Worse at Using It.

There has never been a better time in human history to be stupid.

That's impressive when you think about it.

Almost the entirety of human knowledge is sitting in your pocket.

Don't know how an engine works?

You can learn.

Don't understand compound interest?

You can learn.

Want to understand calculus, Roman history, orbital mechanics, nutrition, welding, monetary policy, programming, electrical engineering or how the fucking dishwasher works?

Somebody will teach you.

Probably for free.

A kid sitting on his couch in Ohio has access to information that emperors, presidents and the wealthiest people alive couldn't have imagined a few generations ago.

We built the greatest information-delivery system in human history.

And then used it to watch a guy open boxes.

There's a popular claim floating around that today's generation is the first in American history to be less intelligent than the generation before it.

That's a fantastic headline.

It's also not something the evidence lets us state that cleanly.

And since this is an article about people becoming intellectually lazy, repeating an unsupported claim because it helps the article would be pretty fucking funny.

What we do know isn't particularly comforting.

In the federal government's 2023 assessment of adult skills, American literacy and numeracy both declined from 2017.

The percentage of American adults performing at the lowest literacy level went from 19 percent to 28 percent.

More than one in four.

Numeracy wasn't exactly crushing it either: 34 percent of adults were at the lowest level. National Center for Education Statistics

Look at kids and things don't get prettier.

In 2023, 13-year-olds scored lower in both reading and mathematics than they did a decade earlier.

Reading fell 7 points.

Math fell 14. Nations Report Card

That's not proof that human brains are shrinking.

It doesn't mean every 22-year-old is dumber than every 42-year-old.

It doesn't mean America has been getting progressively smarter since 1776 and Gen Z finally broke the streak.

Reality is annoyingly resistant to slogans.

But something clearly isn't going particularly well.

And that's fucking fascinating.

Because we're not suffering from a lack of information.

We're drowning in it.

The problem has reversed.

For most of human history, knowledge was scarce.

Now attention is scarce.

And attention might matter more.

Think about what we've done to ourselves.

You're reading an article.

Notification.

Back to the article.

Text message.

Article.

Instagram.

Article.

Email.

Article.

Someone sends you a video.

You watch fifteen seconds.

Swipe.

Another.

Swipe.

Another.

Eventually you return to the article and realize you don't remember what the fuck you were reading.

This isn't stupidity in the traditional sense.

It's something stranger.

We built an environment where sustained thought has to compete against products engineered specifically to interrupt it.

And the interruption is winning.

Then we removed the requirement to remember anything.

Why remember a fact when Google remembers it?

Why learn the route when GPS knows it?

Why calculate something when your phone calculates it?

Why read the document when somebody summarized it?

Why read the summary when somebody made a video?

Why watch the video when AI can tell you what it said?

Every individual step makes perfect sense.

That's the uncomfortable part.

Technology keeps removing cognitive work from our lives because cognitive work is inconvenient.

And convenience sells.

Eventually you have to wonder what happens when we outsource enough of the work.

AI is about to put this experiment on steroids.

I use AI.

A lot.

It is fucking extraordinary.

Which is exactly why I'm suspicious of it.

Used correctly, AI lets a capable person move unbelievably fast.

Used incorrectly, it allows someone to skip the part where capability gets developed in the first place.

Those are not the same thing.

A calculator is incredibly useful if you understand mathematics.

It's considerably less impressive if you have no idea whether the answer it produced is absurd.

AI has the same problem multiplied by approximately everything.

If a machine writes the argument, summarizes the source, evaluates the evidence and gives you the conclusion, you received an answer.

Did you learn anything?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

This isn't another old-man argument about kids and phones.

Every generation does this shit.

Older Americans aren't walking around demonstrating universal intellectual superiority. In the same 2023 adult-skills data, Americans aged 55–65 scored lower than younger groups in several areas. National Center for Education Statistics

So blaming "kids today" would be convenient.

And wrong.

This is an environmental problem.

We're all standing in it.

The real danger isn't that people become incapable of knowing facts.

Facts have never been cheaper.

The danger is losing the abilities required to do something with them.

Read something difficult.

Hold two conflicting ideas simultaneously.

Notice bullshit.

Understand probability.

Separate evidence from authority.

Follow an argument longer than thirty seconds.

Change your mind.

Recognize when you don't know something.

Sit quietly with a problem without immediately reaching for somebody else's answer.

Those are expensive skills.

They require effort.

Effort is exactly what our technology keeps promising to eliminate.

And maybe that's where this actually matters.

Because a society doesn't need everyone to know everything.

That's impossible.

It needs enough people capable of figuring things out.

People who can encounter something they don't understand and work the problem.

People who can distinguish confidence from competence.

People who can recognize when the machine, politician, influencer, professor, CEO, journalist—or their own fucking brain—is feeding them bullshit.

That's harder to outsource.

At least it should be.

There is an incredible irony here.

We spent thousands of years trying to make information universally accessible.

We basically succeeded.

And access turned out not to be the finish line.

It was the starting line.

Having information isn't knowledge.

Knowledge isn't understanding.

Understanding isn't judgment.

And none of them are intelligence.

Maybe we're not becoming stupider.

Maybe we've built a world that makes it incredibly easy to live without getting smarter.

I'm not sure that's better.

QUESTION EVERYTHING.

Especially the answer that required the least effort.

NTHNG