Are We Living in a Stupidogenic Society?

Strauss–Howe generational theory

It is satisfying to learn a "hard" skill like fast touch typing, effective stick-shift driving, playing musical instruments etc. I think really fast mental arithmetic is in the same category.. a skill practiced through much repetition and real motivation. It doesn't necessarily mean a smarter brain.

People will get good at something. In the modern distract-o-verse, perhaps few can muster the concentration any more to sit through a cerebral slow-paced movie, or read a whole book, or even a long well-written article without skimming (or, I suppose now, asking an LLM to summarize it in bullet form). But possibly today's crowd is good at filtering an amount of information noise that would have made past generations' heads explode.

And a physical skill that they have, that I with some of the old skills never will, is really effective interaction with smartphone app type UIs. I find them frustrating, and flee to the more traditional world of web interfaces on a big screen with keyboard and mouse. But I can see that younger folks don't really need those any more.