My favorite chart from this report is the one on page ~230ish where they show science benchmark test scores for students who use AI to study, and it basically just makes you perform much worse at any level (except one data point where the AI users perform only slightly worse). I’ve kept a few print outs of the page to hand out to the AI-pilled students I work with. In one of their words “wow. This is pretty damning”.
https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2097511936728649809
based on the replies, europe aint coming out of this anytime soon, since there seems to be a complete unwillingness to actually deal with the issue. instead, what we see is the racism reflexes of the ethnically fascist europeans coming out
There is a lot of denial in the west, people who’ve been taught they’re special and superior to everyone else are having a hard time adjusting to the world where the west is no longer at the top.
It’s almost like moving to all remote learning for a couple years left kids behind educationally. I’m lucky to be old enough to be well out of schooling when the pandemic came around, but I can’t imagine having to go through high school remotely and having any sort of expectation for success.
This drop started in 2018 though?
There are no data points between 2018 and 2022. Having said that, looking at the more legible charts on page 57 of the full report (same content as the summary chart, just easier to read), it looks like:
- Science has been falling pretty steadily starting at the 2009-2012 cycle. No apparent covid effects.
- Reading and math both might have had a decline leading up to 2018 (I’d need someone to do actual statistics to know if it is statistically significant). However, they had a significantly bigger decline starting in the 2018-2022 cycle, and continuing into the 2022-2025 cycle.
Ah, NM then.
Not to mention the massive use of LLMs to do the homework and thinking for the student.
Grredy and right wing govs don’t want a good school system, they wouldn’t exist without ignorant and stupid people, they need obedient and ignorant minions.
and in case anybody is wondering how other countries are doing
what confuses me about china here is that they only test 4 provinces.
i’d be interested in the result for the whole country
The system in China is fairly standardized, so I’d expect the results would be similar.
I wouldn’t, what works in an overpopulated hellhole won’t work so well when you have less than a hundred students in the school
Given high social mobility in China, it appears that the education system does work consistently. Also, not sure what these overpopulated hellholes are.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
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Huh, I wonder what Singapore is doing different.
They just have an extremely competitive school system. The score does come with a cost.
Maybe, but does no one else have a competitive school system? That seems incomplete.
Singapore really is a special case in that regard. China dropping on the list is likely a healthy sign actually because it means less pressure on the kids.
Why is almost every country on that list worse than they used to be?
But don’t worry, we have AI now…
OECD being the always the same map states, a.k.a. the “free world,” a.k.a. “NATO and pals.”
It’s almost as if in order to have outcomes, you have to materially invest in those outcomes.
The Western world is fast approaching the limits of how far pure idealism can take them
The Western world is fast approaching the limits of how far pure idealism can take them
Don’t worry, they are measuring those limits with a caliper and riding the line as far as it can take them
Damn I wonder what happened in 2019-2020. Must’ve been the wind
It’s strange that it never recovered, too.
Climate change, COVID, late stage capitalism, fascism, social media… The so-called polycrisis. It’s no wonder kids aren’t as enthusiastic about learning anymore. I wouldn’t be either.
The so-called polycrisis
It’s called capitalism.
One two punch of no in-person schooling into llms. There’s years of kids who really got fucked.
Trending downwards for years.
Without context for the numbers or their significance, this seems like another “AAH! Education Panic!” bit of discourse.
Pretty obvious the big hit happened during COVID and now we’re in a long hangover period. But absent more meat on the bone than “Number was 500 and now it’s 460”. What’s the useful takeaway from this information? Other than to just express more generic Doomerist sentiments in the comments? Hard to say.
Also might be worth asking, if the numbers had gone up instead of down, would anyone here be celebrating? Would it have even been posted? Case in point:
The Test-Optional Paradox: Why Published SAT Scores Keep Rising Even as Fewer Students Submit Them
Is this something we should be happy about or sad about?
the west is clearly collapsing, so yeah, we should be celebrating.
First of all intelligence is pretty relative, I think people rejecting the modern school system is smart although destructive for themselves. Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s I realise you’re .world guy, but how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control? Every system has been like this, and there is no reason why ruling elites with lots of power and money wouldn’t encourage the dumbing down of society. They want to fuck and exploit you. 🙄
Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s
I mean, if you’re talking about IQ, you’re misreading those statistics. It’s not the Intelligence that’s been going down. It’s the Quotient that’s been going up. The baseline (ie, IQ = 100) for intelligence is significantly higher today than it was sixty years ago. That’s in part due to improvements in health and nutrition, but also the end result of people running these tests so regularly that you can effectively study for them in advance.
how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control?
I don’t think the “ruling elites” have any kind of consensus on what they want, as evidenced by the perpetual infighting culminating in outright violence aimed at one another. I don’t think these economic elites really have a grasp of what they’re trying to do. Half of them thought Jeffery Epstein was a genius based on an email correspondence that suggests he was barely literate. If Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, and Trump are any indication of how the average Ruling Elite operates, they’re thinking with their dicks half the time and with a nostril full of coke the other half.
That this fractious conglomerate of idiots, assholes, and fuckbois have a plan more sophisticated than “Steal Everything Not Nailed Down and trade it for Pedo-Coins” is not in evidence. A look into their (routinely poorly managed) interpersonal communications suggest that some of them think they’re doing EugenicsPlus super-intelligence breeding programs by getting THOTs on Twitter pregnant. Others want to put their brains on the computer to live forever. Still others think they can achieve world conquest by running a strat from HOI4 set on Medium difficulty.
If there’s an intelligence gap in this country, I would argue that it’s top down. The so-called Elites are the ones getting dumber faster than the rest of us.
They want to fuck and exploit you
So did the Cave Man. But we’re so far off from the 11-D Chess of Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger, when it comes to socio-economic machinations. This is Charles VI / Henry VI territory. These people are drooling their way into the 21st century and we’re just getting dragged along behind them.
IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere (shitty table copy but search for it in the link to read):
Country Peak Gain Period Reversal Detected? Approximate Reversal Date Source Basis Norway 1954–1995 Yes ~1995 Military conscript data Denmark 1959–1998 Yes ~1998 Military conscript data France 1949–1999 Yes ~1999 National assessment data United Kingdom 1950s–2000s Partial ~2000s Multiple study sources United States 1932–1990s Plateau ~1990s Normative restandardizations Netherlands 1952–1980s Unclear Debated Wechsler norm comparisons Kenya 1980s–2000s No
https://neurolaunch.com/rise-in-average-iq-scores-over-the-20th-century/
IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere
You’re describing the “Reverse Flynn Effect”, which is still hotly debated as happening at all much less happening to this day. And it’s got nothing to do with modern-day school performance listed in OP’s image. The Flynn Effect is more neatly tied to the Lead-Crime Hypothesis, having emerged in the 1990s and largely restricted itself to post-industrial nation states.
I was replying to you, and you were discussing IQ.
Also, not hotly debated, but more complicated: https://personality-project.org/revelle/publications/dworak.23.pdf
Kissinger was also an idiot, saw him before he died. Funny how we all say they’re so stupid yet can’t do anything to organize against them right? Its like 99.9% of the people you meet will just take the money and run. They always have some excuse to do it as well. So even if they don’t have a grand plan of dumbing us down it seems to be working and it seems to be happening as well, and we seem to be unable to create spaces to counter that bullshit. During the pandemic they were arguing about whether it was better for kids or adults to get really sick from this shit. They decided it would be better for adults to get sick because god forbid they stop making money and create a generation of crippled youth which doesn’t matter anyways (because AGI is coming) and then just use the dumb meat bags as workers.
With context the report says that the decline predates covid
People quickly turn to explanations such as the impact of the COVID pandemic, but a decline in reading was already visible well before the pandemic hit. We cannot say for sure, but declining levels of reading for enjoyment and the shift towards digital reading – skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information – may be compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data.
I guess they did leave some children behind after all. Didn’t some of the first public access AIs launch around 2018?
Well… fuck
wonder when lte video content became available.
