The Demise of Critical Thinking Will Doom Us Before AI Does
No algorithm can replace human wisdom and analysis. But no algorithm will ever need to if we abandon — wholesale — a millennium of critical reading and thinking skills.
As I pen this newsletter, we are amid a multi-generational crisis, witnessing a significant decline in critical thinking and reading comprehension. The younger generations, in particular, are reading less, retaining less of what they read, and struggling to engage in critical analysis. This trend, though subtle, is undeniably real. If left unchecked, we run the risk of eroding the very foundations of our society.
I vividly remember a five-year-old scrolling through Instagram for almost an hour at a shopping centre. His eyes were tired and red but firmly planted on the screen, and he rarely blinked. He screamed at his sister, who tried to snatch the phone, with all his might and grabbed the phone back. His parents came running, hearing him scream, and took their daughter away, leaving the boy with the phone again. He was showing signs of screen addiction.
The prevalence of bite-sized content and viral videos is wreaking havoc on our minds. Many of us have already lost, or are in the process of losing, the ability to focus and the patience to consume lengthy, complex, or tedious content. Our attention spans have shrunk to mere seconds, leading to a preference for skimming and scanning over close reading. This shift in our reading habits has profound implications for our society and how we process information.
🤔 Fragmentation Of Thinking
While technology has undoubtedly facilitated the widespread dissemination of information, it has also had a profound impact on our thinking process. We find ourselves bombarded with a constant stream of noise and sensationalism, which can be overwhelming and detrimental to our ability to think critically and deeply.
King of Baits — Clickbaits
Social media posts nowadays have clickbait headlines that appeal to our emotions rather than intellect. It makes us susceptible to misinformation, and then, we share them without reading them completely as a reaction to these posts.
Objective truth has become less important than subjective feelings and base impulses. The context, nuance, and accuracy doesn’t matter anymore.
Eroding Comprehension
We cannot thoughtfully process information and make reasoned decisions without reading comprehension. Our ability to thoroughly analyse issues, think critically, look at different perspectives, spot logical fallacies and weigh evidences takes a hit. Instead our opinions get shaped by confirmation bias and alarmist rhetoric rather than facts. We have forgotten how to apply close reading to modern media. We still retain the basic cognitive abilities, but we fail to leverage them to question and scrutinize the information presented.
The very foundations of a healthy democracy — an educated populace — gets eroded as we become a generation that only consumes and not digests information.
Intellectually Lazy
Our generation is continuously failing to use our critical faculties. We scan online posts to find viewpoints confirming our biases instead of considering different perspectives. We allow our thinking to be influenced by loud voices rather than reasoned discourse and debate. We have become intellectually lazy.
📚 Reading > Utilitarian Skill
Reading exposes us to new cultures, ideas and experiences. It allows us to imagine other lives, worldviews and perspectives. When we read deeply and thoughtfully, we exercise our mental capacities. We develop focus, abstract thinking and analytical skills. By reading stories, we develop emotional insights into the human condition, cognitive growth and emotional intelligence.
Here are my top five reasons why you should make reading a habit:
Strengthens Your Brain - Research out of Emory University showed that the deeper readers went into the story, the more areas of the brain were activated. Moreover this activity stayed elevated for several days even after the participants finished the book. The more you read, the stronger the complex networks in your brain becomes.
Reduces Stress - A study conducted at Sussex University showed that reading reduces your stress levels by up to 68%, in as little as six minutes of being immersed in a book. It slows your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure and relaxes your muscles.
Enhances Creativity - A 2009 study has shown a significant high correlation in college students who read for pleasure versus creativity than those who didn’t. Students who read for pleasure had higher levels of creativity, more positive perceptions of their professors, were eager to learn and achieved their academic goals easier.
Improves Memory - Studies show reading improves episodic memory by constantly engaging with your short-term and long-term memory through verbal recall. It also strengthens working memory, which is its capacity to hold information in your brain while working on different tasks.
Improves Concentration and Focus - Research from Microsoft has shown that since the year 2000, the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. Studies have shown that elementary school kids with higher levels of reading comprehension can concentrate on longer tasks and had a higher visual reaction time.
🤖 Comprehension in the Wake of AI
Some would argue that AI poses the greatest existential threat of our time. Although I wouldn’t completely agree to that, I still believe it can be potentially dangerous in the future, but not in it’s current state. It lacks sentience — the ability to think, imagine and feel.
In contrast, the death of critical thinking due to reduced reading comprehension in humans harms billions of sentient minds. Losing the ability to comprehend the complexities of the world around us and make ethical judgements with global consequences, is an existential crisis.
No algorithm can replace human wisdom and analysis. But no algorithm will ever need to, if we ourselves abandon — wholesale — a millennium of critical reading and thinking skills.
🖼️ The Bigger Picture
One could easily throw the blame at GenZ by ignoring their mass vulnerabilities to poorly structured misinformation demonstrated by older users. But this is just an excuse, the bigger picture tells us that it’s a complex phenomenon.
We cannot ignore the role played by social media platforms that now dominate the modern media landscapes. They have evolved to become technologies that enable rapid spread of information. They prefer bite-sized content that grabs attention. They have algorithms that elevate sensationalist clickbait over thoughtful discourse.
Social networks provide a fertile ground for misinformation and emotionally charged falsehoods. It becomes difficult for complex truthful concepts to cut throught all the noise.
Our brains have been conditioned by modern media in ways antithetical to immersive, contemplative reading. Notifications and the endless stream of stimuli fragments our concentration into tiny shattered shards. When we multitask across apps and sites, we grasp very little, but we expose ourselves to diverse ideas and perspectives. Our attention flits briefly from one post to another, from one app to another, without getting an opportunity to dive deeper into any topic.
The new age apps and sites are deliberately designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities: Pull-to-refresh and auto-play tricks our brain with endless novelty. Notifications are triggers to interrupt our thought process with external prompts.
Clickbait headlines and preview images, controversial or provocative abstracts, hijack our curiosity and prey on our emotions. Social media algorithms are programmed to learn which content keeps us hooked on to their platforms the longest.
Engaging interfaces optimised to maximise time on site and addiction masks vapid content. Beautiful and good looking people peddling inane advice. We endure boring repetitive videos just to see how they turn out in the end. Pages stuffed with ads and ads sandwiched between videos crush our will to concentrate. Our attention is getting monetised.
It is also unfair to blame the technology and technology creators alone. The economics of the news industry have evolved to prioritise profits over public service. As they moved away from traditional revenue models, they started pursuing clicks and shares over quality journalism, flooding feeds with distractions over substantive writing, speed over accuracy. These institutional pressures make it harder for nuanced investigative stories and journalism to thrive.
Even our schools face immense pressure to teach to standardised tests, drill math and science facts to students over critical thinking skills. Students are rewarded for rote memorisation more than original analysis. Expository writing is emphasised less than formulaic essays.
The system is discouraging intellectual curiosity and patience needed for deep reading.
Now do you see why I call it a complex phenomenon? One can argue that modern digital media offers many positives like exposing people to perspectives they may never otherwise encounter, but the collateral damage to attention span and curiosity is real.
❓Consequences
The consequences of reduced reading comprehension and attention span permeates several facets of public life.
Civic Engagement — Citizens lack the desire to read policy analysis and long-form journalism, civic engagement suffers. People grow apathetic and cynical due to misinformation from political ads and activists. Protest slogans replace thoughtful debate and educated activism. With a shallow understanding among citizens, the democracy cannot function healthily.
Politics — Discourse gets diluted to thoughtless slogans. Misinformation is propagated to confirm their biases without any nuanced analysis. Voters make uninformed choices. Partisan divides widen as we lose shared information sources and ways to communicate across differences. Society fragments without a baseline understanding of the truth.
Medicine — Avoidance of health literature enabled quackery and pseudoscience to spread like wildfire. Patients cannot weigh statistics, risks and expert guidance. People refuce vaccines, take unnecessary supplements, undergo unneeded procedures, and make ill-informed lifestyle choices. Public health suffers.
Business — Executives make decisions reflexively based on gut reactions instead of studying data, analysis and viewpoints. Policies are formed to benefit short-term goals over long term societal impacts. Ethical considerations takes the back seat. Uninformed investors makes choices biased by rumours, hypes, and heuristics rather than economic fundamentals. Financial engineering trumps tangible innovations backed by scientific literacy.
🌯 Wrapping up
In essence, across fields, we lose shared bases of information to communicate ideas precisely. Due to the reduction of reading complex literature and critical thinking, our vocabularies shrink, and data-driven discourse gets replaced with emotional analogies. A population that struggles with reading comprehension and attention deficit cannot enable wise judgement on worldly matters, empathy across differences, effective policies, economic progress and scientific reasoning. In my opinion, reviving reading comprehension and critical thinking should be the most urgent priorities for the future of human race.
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That’s a wrap. I’ll see you in the next one.
Sanjay.