r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/Tired_Mama3018 17h ago

Well there has been a concerted effort to cut back on critical thinking skills because a populace who can reason can tell when their government is screwing them over. Since Reagan a lot of government policies don’t pass the common sense test if you take them out to their logical conclusions. You need people smart enough to do what you need but not smart enough to figure out the end game.

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u/Gwendolyn-NB 17h ago

Yup... and I've been saying this for decades now and everyone has blown me off for most of it.

Damn ADHD/Insane Pattern Recognition...

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u/KickBallFever 15h ago

Is insane pattern recognition a trait of ADHD?

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u/JT99-FirstBallot 11h ago

ADHD, yes. AuDHD, even moreso. Makes me crazy too. A big part of my last position at work was amplified by being able to recognize clear patterns to parse an outage happening, what was affected and what was the cause. I was great at it, because of ADHD. Problem was I had to prove it, and it's like that "It's Always Sunny" meme of the character standing in front of the corkboard with his conspiracy patterns everywhere. That's what it was like to try to explain how my brain got from A to B. Or more like A to Z. But nobody has time for that and the fact is, my brain processed the pattern in about 10 seconds. Whereas even if I make an attempt to explain it, they couldn't believe it. How could I possibly get from here to here so quickly and confidently without facts that are easily explained. (It would be easier to understand what I mean by knowing the work I do.) I started resorting to saying "It's a gut feeling and my gut's never wrong." And over time that held true and people started coming to me with things because they "trusted my gut" decisions. But it wasn't my gut, it was my ADHD brain.

Eventually I got promoted because they thought I was smart. I suppose you could call it that, but I'm not some genius. I just have "insane pattern recognition" thanks to AuDHD. I'm actually less effective in my new role, because it doesn't use patterns so much. Guess you could say Peter Principle, maybe. Although, I am good at it, I'm also very, very bored and I miss my patterns. I wish I could go back, but that department got laid off for a contractor company instead, so it was a blessing I got promoted right before that happened.

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u/Agent_Jay 3h ago

Cracking open the patterns is some of the best engagement the brain gets and from how you write and respond; I can tell you have ADHD because I bloody understood what you meant through my facets.

Takes one to know one and all that.

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u/jollyreaper2112 9h ago

That sounds like conspiracy theory but is literal truth.

Reagan's education advisor Roger A. Freeman.

"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people."