From my conversation with @HumanProgress: "Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a relatively recent invention. Reading has become so second nature for many of us that we simply assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, as video has become so cheap because of the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You see this when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve some other problem. I get five videos, and I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” Just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are choosing the video. And the massive availability of video—TikTok, YouTube, and the like—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect, and of cognitive sophistication in general."