Pawn 17 posted:

Phlegmish posted:

what i'm getting from the second graph is that american kids today are better at math than in the seventies, eighties and nineties

Rough Lobster posted:

he always makes a joke about how I look like a million bucks now so why am I paying him only ten?

blarzgh posted:

"Uhh, this test shows that we're getting dumber and lazier."
"Man gently caress tht test we dont need it to tell us weer smart. Lets just not take it anymore."

poorlifedecision posted:

lol at the idea that any more than 10% of this thread was born before 1980. Only a millennial would sit around posting about how terrible millennials are. We all know that Pre-1980 generations don't use "computers" or "social media" or browse "comedy forums."

joat mon posted:

I took it before the scores were inflated by 50% so that the millennials would feel special.

Moridin920 posted:

They added another section; that's not just inflating scores?

If anything I could have got a better score. The new writing section was my weakest area. Dumb section anyway; writing is so subjective (though they're supposed to just judge mechanics vs content it's dumb to have anything on a standard test be graded by humans).

Bokito posted:

We have a new millennial intern at my office.

The guy is like 27 years old and in his third year of college.
He has started and dropped out of at least 3 previous studies.
He smells like death. You can literally smell him coming in.
He tries to loudly chime in with discussions that he isn't part of or has any knowledge of, even on his first day. STFU.
He spent 2 days configuring his own laptop because he refused to use the desktop PC we provided him with.

Only thing I haven't seen him do is check his phone constantly.

He will be here until February.

Pawn 17 posted:

dialhforhero posted:

That graph is a pretty good indicator that more and more children are taking the SAT to go to college and that when you increase the availability of college to a wider, previously untested population that would never have attempted to go to college, the test scores lower but you have more and more college educated people that otherwise would not have been college educated in the 70's.

poorlifedecision posted:

lol at the idea that any more than 10% of this thread was born before 1980. Only a millennial would sit around posting about how terrible millennials are. We all know that Pre-1980 generations don't use "computers" or "social media" or browse "comedy forums."

Ka0 posted:

Ladies and gents, the future

Moridin920 posted:

btw I got a 2100 on the SAT what did you goons get

Bip Roberts posted:

Umm 1600 is max u liar.

thathonkey posted:

that was the old school SAT that us cool folk took. the new one for dumb rear end babies goes to like 2400 or some poo poo

Yaos posted:

So you're saying we should stop letting the poor go to to college? I agree. -The Republican party

ethanol posted:

Keep tuition high. Keep out the riffraff

ethanol posted:

Keep tuition high. Keep out the riffraff

ethanol posted:

Keep tuition high. Keep out the riffraff

Ratjaculation posted:

millennial.mp4?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3c67AYl0rM

joat mon posted:

The new section that only became necessary when schools realized that the millennials didn't even know what a five paragraph essay was, let alone be able to write one with correct spelling and grammar?

Not that you are any less able, in fact you're almost 600 SAT points smarter than your predecessors. GOLD STAR!

Moridin920 posted:

lot of olds mad that a section got added to the SAT lol 'grade inflation'


yeah that's not why they added it lol

also they removed it again recently so really everyone in the last 8 years or so that had to deal with it just got hosed over in an experiment

Toadstrieb posted:

Thanks for getting back to me. Anyway man, here's the thing, millennials appear to like the constant corporate rim jobs they're being offered. I don't think you could say that a generation before or since has been so ready to have their lives engineered around consumption. They're totally credulous and dissent is viewed as abnormal, where, for gen X and before, dissent, even if it was also often commercialized, was valued.

In this day and age, you're considered hosed up if you can't enjoy these pre-formatted stories about your life and how great things are. It's like a big wave of possible dissention was coming, promising to wash away some of the bullshit, and then these idiots were born and just started making GBS threads more.

The resentment machine posted:

For all the endless consideration of the rise of the digitally connected human species, one of the most important aspects of internet culture has gone largely unnoticed. The internet has provided tremendous functionality, for facilitating commerce, communication, research, entertainment, and more. Yet for a comparatively small but influential group of its most dedicated users, its most important feature, the killer app, is its power as an all-purpose sorting mechanism, one that separates the worthy from the unworthy—and in doing so, gives some meager semblance of purpose to generations whose lives are largely defined by purposelessness. For the postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers who exert such disproportionate influence over online experience, the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.

The modern American “meritocracy,” the education/employment vehicle, prepares thousands of upwardly mobile young strivers for everything but the life they will actually encounter. The endlessly grinding wheel of American “success” indoctrinates young people with a competitive vision that most of them never escape. The numbing and frenetic socioacademic sorting mechanism compels most of the best and the brightest adolescents in our middle and upper class to compete for various laurels from puberty to adulthood. School elections, high school and college athletics, honors societies, finals clubs, dining clubs, the subtler (but no less real) social competitions—all make competition the natural habitus of American youth. Every aspect of young adult life is transformed into a status game, as academics, athletics, music and the arts, travel, hobbies, and philanthropy are all reduced to fodder for college applications.

This instrumentalizing of all of the best things in life teaches teenagers the unmistakable lesson that nothing is to be enjoyed, nothing experienced purely, but rather that each and every part of human life is ultimately subservient to what is less human. Competition exists as a vehicle to provide the goods, material or immaterial, that make life enjoyable. The context of endless competition makes that means into an end itself. The eventual eats the immediate. No achievement, no effort, no relationship can exist as an end in itself. Each must be ground into chum to attract those who confer status and success—elite colleges and their representatives, employers.

As has been documented endlessly, this process starts earlier and earlier in life, with elite preschools now requiring that students pass tests and get references, before they can read or write. Many have lamented the rise of competition and gatekeeping in young children. Little attention has been paid to what comes after the competitions end.

...

The competitive urge still pulses. It has to; the culture in which students have been raised has denied them any other framework with which to draw meaning. The world has assimilated the rejection of religion, tradition, and other determinants of virtue that attended the 1960s and wedded it to a vicious contempt for the political commitments that replaced them in that context. Culture preempts the kind of conscious understanding that attends to conviction, that all traditional designations of meaning are uncool.

If straightforward discussion of virtue and righteousness is socially unpalatable, straightforward political engagement appears worse still. Pushed by an advertising industry that embraces tropes of meaning just long enough to render them meaningless (Budweiser Clydesdales saluting fallen towers) and buffeted by arbiters of hipness that declare any unapologetic embrace of political ideology horribly cliché, a fussy specificity envelops every definition of the self. Conventional accounts of the kids these days tend to revert to tired tropes about disaffection and irony. The reality is sadder: They are not passionless, but many have invested their passion in a shared cultural knowledge that denies the value of any other endeavor worthy of personal investment.

Contemporary strivers lack the tools with which people in the past have differentiated themselves from their peers: They live in a post-virtue, post-religion, post-aristocracy age. They lack the skills or inspiration to create something of genuine worth. They have been conditioned to find all but the most conventional and compromised politics worthy of contempt. They are denied even the cold comfort of identification with career, as they cope with the deadening tedium and meaninglessness of work by calling attention to it over and over again, as if acknowledging it somehow elevates them above it.

Into this vacuum comes a relief that is profoundly rational in context—the self as consumer and critic. Given the emptiness of the material conditions of their lives, the formerly manic competitors must come to invest the cultural goods they consume with great meaning. Meaning must be made somewhere; no one will countenance standing for nothing. So the poor proxy of media and cultural consumption comes to define the individual. In many ways, cultural products such as movies, music, clothes, and media are the perfect vehicle for the endless division of people into strata of knowingness, savvy, and cultural value.

These cultural products have no quantifiable value, yet their relative value is fiercely debated as if some such quantifiable understanding could be reached. They are easily mined for ancillary content, the TV recaps and record reviews and endless fulminating in comments and forums that spread like weeds. (Does anyone who watches Mad Men not blog about it?) They are bound up with celebrity, both real and petty. They can inspire and so trick us into believing that our reactions are similarly worthy of inspiration. And they are complex and varied enough that there is always more to know and more rarefied territory to reach, the better to climb the ladder one rung higher than the person the next desk over.

There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illusory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, The Wire, says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly that the preference for this show to CSI tells everything.

Likewise, the internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningful difference between fans of this band or that, of Android or Apple, or that there is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or The Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.

This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment, ultimately pleases no one. Yet this emptiness doesn’t compel people to turn away from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it draws them further and further in. Faced with the failure of their cultural affinities to define an authentic and fulfilling self, postcollegiate middle-class upwardly-oriented-if-not-upwardly-mobile Americans double down on the importance of these affinities and confront the continued failure with a formless resentment. The bitterness that surrounds these distinctions is a product of their inability to actually make us distinct.

The savviest of the media and culture websites tap into this resentment as directly as they dare. They write endlessly about what is overrated. They assign specific and damning personality traits to the fan bases of unworthy cultural objects. They invite comments that tediously parse microscopic distinctions in cultural consumption. They engage in criticism as a kind of preemptive strike against those who actually create. They glamorize pettiness in aesthetic taste. The few artistic works they lionize are praised to the point of absurdity, as various acolytes try to outdo each other in hyperbole. They relentlessly push the central narrative that their readers crave, that consumption is achievement and that creators are to be distrusted and “put in their place.” They deny the frequently sad but inescapable reality that consumption is not creation and that only the genuinely creative act can reveal the self.

This, then, is the role of the resentment machine: to amplify meaningless differences and assign to them vast importance for the quality of individuals. For those who are writing the most prominent parts of the internet—the bloggers, the trendsetters, the über-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes and online norms—online life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and doing so poorly.

Naerasa posted:

Yesterday I was walking down the street on my phone and some greenpeace dude was like 'Its dangerous to text while youre on the phone!!!!' and I was like lol you dumb gen x carebitch, I'm not texting I'm using Slack

that's my millenial story

circ dick soleil posted:

old person containment thread

This Jacket Is Me posted:

This was cool as hell, actually and that guy is destined for a lot of pussy

thathonkey posted:

remember when TIME magazine pwned all millennials with this epic takedown piece ?



then there was a huge backlash and they had to apologize or change the cover? i dunno i might be remembering those last parts wrong but there was defo a huge uproar amongst millennials

Ratjaculation posted:

there was a hashtag