Just because there is an ever increasing amount of knowledge ever more available to ever more people, thanks to the internet and the technologies that make it possible, it doesn't mean at all that people are getting smarter.

My experience has been that, on the contrary, people are getting intellectually lazier by the minute. With so much information available so easily and so quickly, people are being pressured into thinking less and googling more. Why make the effort to reason critically when it's so much easier just to grab on to the first link returned by a google search?

Moreover, even the statement that knowledge is widespread is not quite accurate. Yes, technically, it's true that more and more knowledge is becoming accessible to more and more people but so is the amount of garbage, and the signal-to-noise ratio may be decreasing (I don't know if that's true, so I'm speculating here now).

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