I didn’t grow up with SMS or internet video but I have no trouble understanding the idea of SMS scams and fake videos. This is not akin to a foreign language. People who grew up with movies or television are deeply familiar with the idea that things you see in moving pictures may not be real. People who grew up with mail and telephones are familiar with the concept of unseen people trying to trick you to steal your money. It’s not hard to apply these same concepts when the video and text is on a handheld device rather than a box in front of the couch or paper in an envelope.

The ones I know who fall for this stuff the most have always been gullible. They were getting taken by cell phone tower investment scams and anti-vac hoaxes decades ago and the only real change is the medium.

> I didn’t grow up with SMS or internet video but

Going through such changes when you are in your twenties or when you are in your sixties is extremely different.

An interesting example I have is working with younger software engineers: those who studied and graduated after clouds existed. It has surprised me more than once, with different people and in different contexts, that they had trouble imagining that one may not always have a fast internet connection or access to a cloud.

I wouldn't call them dumb for that, though.

I’m sure it’s harder when you’re older but it’s nothing like learning a foreign language unrelated to your mother tongue.

And my point is that they don’t have to learn anything new to avoid getting scammed. Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake” and “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice. Unless, of course, they never developed those skills and have been getting taken their whole lives, which seems to be pretty common.

My point is that you are being naive, which is ironic given that you claim they are dumb :-).

> Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake”

This is not an existing skill. The existing skill is a life of learning how other people may try to deceive them. But then the baseline shifts faster than they can imagine, and suddenly their skill is useless.

For instance, humans tend to put more trust into eloquent people, because it usually is synonymous with education. Not that it is a perfect rule, but it is a useful one. Or it was, before LLMs. Now suddenly anyone can sound eloquent. It's not just older people: VCs suffer from the exact same problem. CEOs pay way too much to get bullshitted by McKinsey and the others.

> “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice

Don't you give your money to your bank? How do you know they won't leave with your money or that they won't bankrupt next week? Should I call you dumb if you have been unlucky enough to be in one of those banks?

My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless. If you can understand that the spaceships you saw whizzing around in Star Wars on a theater screen weren't real, you can understand that a dancing cat on a phone screen might not be real. Plenty of old people do understand this, so it's not some impossible task, or even one as difficult as learning an extremely difficult foreign language.

Trusting eloquent people just because of how they sound has always been a way to get scammed. Exposure might be higher now, but people who are getting scammed by eloquent SMSes today were probably getting scammed by friendly, educated-sounding people offering "an incredible investment opportunity" or to "help with the ATM" decades ago, or Amway, or chain letters.

My bank doesn't qualify as "strangers." I have an existing business relationship with them. That relationship started when I reached out to them, not vice versa.

> My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless.

But it's not your choice to make.

And really, how many people don't understand why they should use a password manager? Or can't be arsed to learn how to use one? Or don't understand how to parse a link like https://microsoft.updateeleven.com?

Are they dumb or do they lack practice? I bet they lack practice because they don't really give a shit about that. My grandmother is 100, she doesn't spend 6h a day swiping TikTok, and she doesn't grasp the concept of AI-generated videos. But she can knit infinitely better than me. Should she call me dumb because I can't knit?

Because people don't give a shit about stuff you care about doesn't make them dumb. Maybe you don't know much about music, or painting, or dinosaurs, and that does not make you dumb.

I'm not sure I understand your point.

First, older generation having lower IQ than newer is neither the Flynn effect nor its reversal. The Flynn effect compares historical test results to current ones; not old people vs young people but old people when they passed the test long ago with young people passing the test now. If elderly people are loosing IQ points it's most certainly because of age not because they have had a lower IQ all along.

And the reversal of the Flynn effect states that younger people are actually the one having the lower hand on this comparison.

I wonder what this comment says about your IQ.

I mean surely theyve seen a cat before to know that two legged cats don't dance with babies.

I don't think they're dumb either. But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.

> I mean surely theyve seen a cat before to know that two legged cats don't dance with babies.

They've lived in a world where it was hard to make convincing fake videos, and where it would only be worth doing in contexts like movies or maybe propaganda. Suddenly, photorealistic videos pop up everywhere.

Also I don't know if you've seen a circus before, but animals can do very impressive stuff.

> But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.

Again that's harsch. If we're talking about believing in a video that shows cats doing something that could happen in a circus (I haven't seen the video, but why not), then they are believing in something that does not matter much; it's just fun. There are young people that truly believe that the Earth is flat, I don't know what's worse.

>I don't know what's worse.

It's the same thing entirely: people trusting images and signals from control apparatuses to override the signals from their own senses.

Some form of that has been going on throughout history. Basic socialization involves replacing a part of how you see the world, with a simulation of others' simulation of an imaginary "everyone" expects to see things.

If this sounds weird, that's because it is. And, not only is it difficult to think about, but once you manage to imagine it you may find it viscerally terrifying. So you don't. (It's why you don't remember early childhood.) Granted, none of that has ever happened at this... no, not "scale"! It's never happened at this resolution, i.e. ability to discern.

Machines make decisions billions of times a second along constantly evolving, networked rulesets; consumers are afforded to elect rulemakers once every few years in avoidance of mass tantrum, and otherwise are free to vote with wallets and feet for whichever evil they consider the lesser one. Which one can be said to be in control?

Ultimately, it's not terribly important if the cat dances or what shape the planet is. What matters is whether you will go kill when your phone gives you the "kill" command: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

Two 60ish ladies are sitting in the cafe next to me, one isn't able to figure out where some thing on the phone had arrived from, the other one isn't able to explain to her friend that it came "but from the phone itself!"

Of course, from some slopmonger, data harvester, ad broker, spammer... but they spent their lives without having to learn about the shape of the earth; why would they want to know who makes the phone do things "on its own"?

Why would they want to know that the Free Pleasant Stimulus of the "cat and baby video" is not For Realsies Real? I'm not saying they don't actually need to understand that, but nobody ever tries to explain why would they want to.

Society is mighty and benevolent, one can go through life and even raise kids without ever learning about object permanence. So they do, and when in their sunset years when they ask "who stole the money", society is only happy to provide a culprit for that, too. Remember that very few of the phone scammers want to be there, either.

Nice scenario.