"The last generation was better because they read _books_ and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on frivolous garbage" is also a trope.
People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ?
More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones...
(Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?)
Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker.
I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation.
It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".