it certainly feels as if people have become markedly stupider due to this phenomenon and the internet. has anyone attempted to quantify this? some measure of falsely held beliefs over time? level of conspiratorial thinking over time?
I don't think people are stupider in the sense of less knowledge (or less g, for sure), but there is a phenomenon where people are expected to know more and know it quickly. Before the internet, if you were a working scientist and you wanted to know about something that wasn't in your field, it was a fairly involved process to figure it out, not 10 seconds reading Wikipedia. Analogously, if you weren't a scientist at all, you'd have to ask a scientist, you couldn't spend 10 seconds reading and potentially misreading Wikipedia, you'd just say "I don't know."
I think this has consequences in other fields besides science too. The general public now has the ability to have well-formed opinions about government policy and its effects, for instance. That may in practice be making people more confident in their ill-formed opinions, where they would have previously deferred to experts. (Of course, it also is a great potential benefit if we use it right, because those experts will generally have their own biases and agendas.)
It ‘seems’ that way for sure, but i have a feeling its because these people who were always this way now have a platform to speak on, or that validates their existing thinking and solidifies it. Its a good point though - how do we test a theory on this? It would be interesting to see if people are doing scientific tests in this space
