8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation

boston.com ^

[BBell]

Author Mark Bauerlein aims to provoke in his new book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future" (Tarcher/Penguin). Do you agree? Take a look at eight reasons the Emory University English professor gives to ''not trust anyone under 30'' -- see which you think is the best. Disagree, or have your own spin? Have your say on this message board. Or see if Bauerlein answered your question directly in a chat from Wednesday, May 14.

1. They make excellent "Jaywalking'' targets

Bauerlein writes: "The ignorance is hard to believe ... It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. ... They are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond -- friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.''

2. They don't read books -- and don't want to, either

"It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted aliteracy ... as a valid behavior of their peers.''

3. They can't spell

Lack of capitalization and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast.

4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing

"On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, 'buddies' will make fun of you,'' Bauerlein says. Wikipedia writing is clean and factual, but colorless and judgment-free. Often the most clever students, with flashes of disorganized brilliance on MySpace, switch to dull Wiki-writing formats for school papers, he says. "If we could combine the style and imagination of MySpace with the content of Wikipedia, we might get good stuff."

5. Grand

[SoothingDave]

I said if a person is average half are smarter half are dumber, period

And that is not correct. It depends on the distribution.

If you have high fliers, your mean will be higher than your median. If you have real low lows, your mean will be lower than median.

[r9etb]

I said if a person is average half are smarter half are dumber, period

You are incorrect. You are describing the median, not the mean.

To see the difference, consider the following 5 numbers:

1,2,3,4,10000

The median is 3 -- half the numbers are above, half the numbers are below. The mean (i.e., average), however, is 2002.

Sometimes there's not much numerical difference between median and mean; but you should never assume that they're the same; they describe very different phenomena.

[monocle]

The source you cite presents a perfect bell-shaped distribution, but since scores cannot dip below zero but can exceed 200 a log normal distribution is probably closer to reality. The actual diistribution approaches the bell-shaped curve and the bell-shaped distribution is used for ease with only minimal errors.

[edzo4]

oh have you tested the entire populations IQ?

[monocle]

Have you ever heard of the Law of Large Numbers?

[MoochPooch]

The problem for me isn’t the ignorance of the kids, but the distorted thinking. Maybe this comes from too much exposure to left-wing groups, who rely heavily on the emotions rather than the intellect. But if you talk to these people, you start to feel like you’re in the Twilight Zone. They are not rational. At all.

[edzo4]

picture in your mind a person of average intelligence, now remember that if they are average half the people are dumber than that, and now you know how Obama was elected.

now I will rewrite it for you math geeks

according to the US census at 22:52 GMT on 05/15/09 the estimated US population is 306,436,404 Picture in your mind the 153,218,202nd least intelligent person on the planet, now if they are the mean and the median, then (50/100) x 306,436,404 of the population is dumber than that. so < 1.5 x 10 to the 6th power are idiots!

[mad_as_he$$]

Any story that requires 10 clicks to read is stupid.

[the OlLine Rebel]

I don’t have to read 129 posts to know you’re going to get skewered big time for suggesting a whole generation is stupid. (Never mind the professor/author.)

It’s happened before. Just neat to see it NOT be about the Hippie generation.

[the OlLine Rebel]

You should. It’s sad - it wasn’t so funny to me as sad when I saw it last year. It seemed to hit the mark too much already - everthing is a sex joke, etc. (i.e., it didn’t just show how “stupid” people are - but how inane and how they obsess on certain things - like sex.)

[the OlLine Rebel]

You mixed up Brit and American “civiliSation” vs “civiliZation”. It’s Brits who love the “s” rather than “z”.

But it IS set, for our cultures. Noah Webster set those spellings, and it’s stuck. To be different (and in this case, more logical than) from the hated British. Do you know we “dumped” tea and took up coffee because of all that warring 200 years ago?

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BBell.

[gogogodzilla]

No, the vampires will step in to save their food supply.

:-P

[huldah1776]

Silly, the nation, Elvis caused the slow death of the nation...
Actually, Elvis was probably the symptom of the cancer when the nation was in stage 1. Hmm. When was stage 1? And what caused the cancer?

[GOP_1900AD]

The kids of the Boomers ... that’s where this hyper digirati thing started.