Tiktok addicted kids, brother.

It’s kind of a meme

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ

but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well

Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.

Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge.

If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.

But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.

Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7.

There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.

Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!

That is a strawman. Who believes in an old man on a cloud judging everyone? Far fewer people believe anything like that than believe. Even online I have never come across anyone whose beliefs could be reasonably characterised that way.

I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here.

Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false.

Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.

Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks.

There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math".

Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar.

This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."

It's less likely to be accurate, it's slower, and far less efficient as a bonus.