ChatGPT is making you dumb, but consuming short-form content is even worse

People think information and understanding are the same thing. They are not. Confuse the two, and you think scrolling equals learning. Bangers shrink your brain. Long-form expands it.

If you're a dad / mom, and your child is around 3 years of age, you would have observed how much they struggle to tag an emotion, and how they bring chaos if they couldn't name an emotion.

My two-and-a-half-year-old recently felt something new. He frowned, then lashed out. The feeling had no name yet. We tried ‘frustrated’. He said ‘no’. Two days later the word clicked, and the tantrums stopped.

I was watching a podcast of Naval Ravikanth's, and I was surprised how one could articulate their thoughts precisely. It felt like he picked each of his words carefully. It even felt like rehearsed, until it wasn't. He had an answer too, he read a hell lot of books and he keeps reading a lot more.

I began getting into a rabbit hole, trying to see if there is any coherence between how many words we know and how it affects our intelligence. It did startle me without doubt.

Psychologists have measured a simple correlation for decades: larger vocabularies map to higher IQ scores. Shrink one, the other follows.

No, it doesn't mean that you read a book about rocket science and you become a rocket scientist, it doesn't work that way. Anything that you read, especially the long-form content with a variety of vocabulary, it makes you think better, you'll lean how to name and tag certain experiences in your life.

I'm very active on X, platform that appraises memes and bangers. Memes and bangers are engineered sugar. They spike, then disappear. Books are protein. They stay in your system and build tissue. The cost of consuming ultra-short forms of content comes with a cost, your vocabulary shrinks, and with it, perhaps your capacity for deeper thought.

Try this: write a paragraph describing grief without using the word ‘sad’. Harder than it looks. Without vocabulary, feelings hide.

I don't want to sound dramatic, but evidence suggests that when we stop reading and writing at length, we may actually be making ourselves less articulate and even less intelligent. According to educational psychologists, vocabulary is one of the single strongest predictors of overall intelligence.

And where do we typically develop a rich vocabulary? Not from memes or bangers, but from long-for content, novels, in-depth articles, essays. You may enjoy shorts, but you might not have enough words in your arsenal to fully articulate your thoughts when it really counts.

Consider a simple experiment between saying you feel "happy" and saying you feel "blissful" or "ecstatic." They all describe joy, but with difference shares of intensity. It's easer to just use "happy" everywhere, it's the kind of simple language that proliferates in tweets and texts. But, in the name of simplicity, you will lose the ability to express those higher dimensions of happiness.

When we started teaching our son the basic emotions, he began regulating his emotions, he is still not ready to experience the difference between "happy", "bliss" or "ecstatic", but when he experiences it, having a more nuanced emotional vocabulary can distinguish and regulate his feelings better.

One psychologist gave the example of trying to pinpoint an emotion: "I'm feeling happy. Really, really happy. So maybe I am thrilled. No, wait, ecstatic... Aha, I've got it! I feel bliss."

The point is, language both reflects and shapes our thinking. If we don’t know the word “bliss,” we might still feel the sensation, but we’ll struggle to identify it or communicate it to others. In a sense, the limits of our vocabulary set the limits of our mental world.

Now, Civilizations that forget their own texts do not merely lose knowledge. They lose the ability to spot bad ideas.

People today, especially younger people are reading fewer books and lengthy articles than any previous generation. How bad is the reading drought? In 1970 one teen in ten skipped books; today it is four in ten. The share of teens who didn’t read any book for fun skyrocketed from about 1 to 4 out of 10. They haven’t stopped reading entirely, of course they’re still reading a lot more text on screens, but what they read now is a stream of short snippets without depth.

One college professor noted that his students used to handle 30-page reading assignments routinely, but now “students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages” and often won’t even finish 20 pages of text with understanding. In other words, attention spans are shrinking and with them the appetite for the written word is diminishing.

This isn't harmless at all, after all, who wouldn't prefer a punchy summary by ChatGPT or a funny meme over a long-winded essay.

Convenience is never free. What you save in seconds you pay in depth. There's a popular counter-argument that short-form content and memes are actually a new language of their own, a more efficient, culturally rich way to communicate. It's like a poetry with speed.

It's a banger post on X, it is poetry, so it must be great... but is it really?

Would you be able to argue on any bangers without actually reading some dense material about it? You wouldn't survive it though. How long can you survive only with a fast food without becoming unhealthy?

Deep reading bridges insight and novel thought. Our brains simply don't engage as deeply or form lasting memories when we skim headlines. And headlines are... clickbait mostly.

Short form content, almost by definition, sticks to simpler, more commonly understood words and phrases, scrolling through social media feed, you can see the same casual lingo and abb over and over. They are just locked into using such a finite amount of words.

We are the creatures who reads for fun, but the previous generations had a good curated content like newspaper, magazines, books. What do we have? Tiktok, X bangers, and tools to summarize YT videos. If we don't want to read something longer, we dump that into ChatGPT and ask what it means. Even ask ELI5, so we get to read like a baby.

Summaries are great for recall, bad for discovery. They strip surprise, the thing your brain needs to form new connections. A diet of summaries is like eating pre-chewed food: easy, but you never learn to bite.

It’s a simple equation: less time spent reading books or long articles means fewer new words learned. And as vocabulary shrinks, so does the ability to comprehend complex texts. It becomes a vicious cycle, struggling to read leads to reading less, which leads to even poorer vocabulary and comprehension.

This has a very real consequences for individuals and for society. When a whole generation is raised by memes and short bursts of content, may find themselves unprepared for the demands of academic reading and writing. A population that communicates only in memes and quick takes could become alarmingly easy to manipulate, because they lack the practice in wrestling with nuanced arguments. If we lose our collective capcity for deep reading and long-form articulation, we risk becoming a society that has plenty of information, but poor in understanding.

To be clear, none of this is to denigrate short-form content completely. Brevity and wit have their place. There's an art to encapsulating an idea in a single clever tweet storm like Naval, there's still value in punch slogans. The problem arises when this replaces entirely our diet for longer content.

For ideas to stick, and for us to internalize knowledge, we usually need the storytelling, context, and repeating that only longer-form content provides.

Research in reading science tells us that a person typically needs to encounter a new word eight to ten times in context to truly learn it. That kind of repeated, contextual exposure naturally happens when you read, say, a novel or a well-argued essay.

Language is a skill, and it atrophies if not exercised. There's an issue of "use it or lose it.". The reason why reading only ChatGPT replies are making your dumber. If we outsourced all our writing to AI or limit our expression to templates and system prompts that always uses trending catchphrases, we aren't using those verbal muscles.

"Sometimes I forget words now." a Stanford grad told "I'm so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it's not there, my brain feels... slower."

Relying on external intelligence, to formulate sentences weakens. The muscles that you don't train/use becomes weaker. Knowledge and language is a muscle.

Using ChatGPT summaries, asking for TL;DRs, writing bangers, watching a tiktok shorts is all fine, if you're also reading essays, reading books, watch longer youtube videos, and listen to lengthy podcasts too.

There is no intelligence without depth. If we give up the long form, we oursource not just memory but meaning. That is too high a price for speed. Let's not become a generation of memes and bangers, because we cannot accelerate as a species without depth.

Reading and writing in the long-form is always rewarding, the future where people losing basic vocabulary to name and tag their personal emotion does sound dire.

The fewer words you know, the fewer thoughts you can think.