ACT test scores have plummeted too. Combined with what we know about the physical brain changes that can be observed after a single mild infection, it all paints a potentially concerning relationship with COVID.
Or maybe ACT test scores have plummeted because these students have experienced 1-2 years of remote teaching, which might have been less effective than in-person school?
> Or maybe ACT test scores have plummeted because these students have experienced 1-2 years of remote teaching, which might have been less effective than in-person school?
As I mentioned in another post, you can check this theory against the pandemic control-group that kept schools open:
Per the comment thread, this doesn't have perfect explanatory power: drivers and ATC have also recorded statistically significant declines over the same time period.
In other words: remote schooling may have had a negative effect on ACT scores, but all evidence points to it not being the only (or even primary) effect.
Regarding this thread, I really want to caution on the desire to automatically assign worse car crash rates to covid-19 infections, or any other specific cause.
Car crashes and ATC mistakes are two different sets of data. Just because they are going up or down at the same time and you can overlay some other event on top of it means absolutely nothing on its own.
There are a lot more reasons that car crash rates can be getting worse. For one thing, they have been trending upwards since smartphones have become prevalent. Car crashes weren't trending down for some time before covid-19. Also, the number of screens installed on automobile dashboards is increasing every year.
Still, I won't automatically assign blame to smartphones or automotive screens unless someone at least attempting to use the scientific method weighs in on the subject, because our intuitions about statistics are often really, really wrong.
> Regarding this thread, I really want to caution on the desire to automatically assign worse car crash rates to covid-19 infections, or any other specific cause.
People’s tolerance levels and general concern for other humans plummeted in the post covid times. The warning signs about acceptable behaviour in supermarkets, medical practices and restaurants proliferated. I don’t know how you measure that effect though.
I don’t know what grocery stores or restaurants you go to but I don’t see this supposed lack of concern for others that you’re talking about. It seems the same to me.
If it helps, I certainly not so worried that I'm going to flip out on minimum wage employees or ground an airplane in a full blown "Karen meltdown", but I do think that the pandemic has left a lot of people disillusioned, that Americans are seeing their standard of living decline, that climate change has left our future uncertain, that the stability of our democracy is in question (more than normal anyway), and that doom scrolling makes it easy to ignore anything but the worst things going on around us. It's difficult to imagine that those pressures aren't contributing to the problem anyway.
> Car crashes and ATC mistakes are two different sets of data. Just because they are going up or down at the same time and you can overlay some other event on top of it means absolutely nothing on its own.
Except that COVID is known to be brain invasive and to affect cognition.
This looks more like refusing to ever entertain the idea that letting COVID rip was a bad idea and lockdowns and vaccinations and masks were justified because you don't like it, than actual scientific rigor.
As far as the vaccine leading to more mild infection goes the impact seems to be unclear. There's been some evidence that disease severity can have an effect on how bad the cognitive issues get. Some studies have suggested that people can end up with greater cognitive impairment if the infection got bad enough to result in hypoxemia/hypoxia, or if they were put on ventilators, or spent longer amounts of time in the ICU, but other research didn't show any link between time in the ICU and the severity of cognitive issues, and others found that people with mild infections might even be more likely to have problems than those with severe cases.
As always, vaccinated or not, the best thing you can do for yourself is avoid getting infected in the first place.
I had a new car for a month (mine got damaged whilst parked). Simply adjusting the aircon fan required screen navigation followed by a fidly touch screen control.
The crash avoidance systen was a distracting alert that took my attention away from the road for none risks but instead increased there likelyhood to become a risk.
Glad to get my own car back with physical switches and dials without all this crap, having to operate a tablet behind the wheel is a dumb idea and no different to operating a smart phone behind the wheel.
This might be the worst real example of a jump to conclusions based on a casual correlation I have seen in my entire life.
I don't even know how to properly deconstruct how irresponsible this style of thinking is, it's just so flabbergasting.
In science you can't just draw lines on the wall between random shit like you're Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
ACT scores are very obviously not a product of your raw brain power as an isolated variable, they include a number of other factors like how much sleep you got last night, your family life, the quality of your curriculum and teachers, your socioeconomic status of yourself and your peers, and, of course, whether you spent a year in a global pandemic emergency while your school district scrambled to switch to a fully online curriculum with zero notice.
There is a very well-documented labor shortage for air traffic controllers. Fewer people are covering the same shifts - that is fact. If we are going to ignore the scientific method and start pointing fingers, this is so much more obviously the type of thing to start scapegoating.
> This might be the worst real example of a jump to conclusions based on a casual correlation I have seen in my entire life. I don't even know how to properly deconstruct how irresponsible this style of thinking is, it's just so flabbergasting.
Exactly who is jumping to conclusions in this exchange?
I used the words "potentially concerning" because that is what I thought and intended to express. I could have used words like "causally disastrous" instead, but they weren't what I thought or intended to express. I am also not smuggling in such a claim in a "just asking questions" sort of way. I think the potential exists, should be studied, and shouldn't be reflexively admitted or dismissed until studied. That's all.
Please respond to what people actually say, and ask questions if what they said wasn't clear to you.
The same as the PISA scores. PISA, which might not be well known is the US, is the International Student Assessment for the 15 years old students in the OECD (and non-OECD) countries. The PISA measures their ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. The PISA scores for 2022 is the lowest in the history of PISA and show a clear trend downward since 2012.
The huge drop in 2022 scores can be explained through the longer school closure period during the pandemic lockdowns. But only partly. The increasing prevalence of mobile phone amongst children and their distractions certainly play a significant part in contributing to the huge drop in PISA scores.
Not necessarily related to the increasing number of air traffic controls incidents, though.
> The huge drop in 2022 scores can be explained through the longer school closure period during the pandemic lockdowns
The latest PISA scores arrived just last week or so and do not support this.
There is a very weak negative correlation between number school closure days and drop in PISA scores, at least in Western European countries. The higher the number of school closure days, the less the results dropped. But the correlation is so weak that it's basically just noise.
Scores dropped pretty much everywhere so the pandemic probably had an effect, but the data does not support school closures (or at least its duration) of being the primary culprit.
I do not have a good English language source to point to (but the raw data is easy to find).
But you didn’t have ubiquitous smartphones and tablets when you were 6-10 years old, and weren’t handed a smartphone to head off a tantrum during the absolutely critical brain development years before school.
> Could also be the consequences of schooling during a lockdown.
Luckily we have the control-group of Sweden, that spent a large part of the pandemic proclaiming that not closing schools was going to have a fantastic positive effect on children's learning.
The actual result: Sweden's PISA results declined much more steeply than countries who used distance-learning during the pandemic.
A lot of people changed their driving habits significantly, and there was a period of significantly less driving. Many people commute much less than before. At some points, traffic was so much below the usual that several record breaking Cannonball runs were had that are unlikely to be broken unless there's a significant relaxation of speed limits nationwide.
For yet another round, East Asian countries sit at the top of the PISA rankings. These are also the countries that had some of the strictest responses to CoVID worldwide.
Those things don't necessarily have any relation, but clearly many countries with strict CoVID responses are still doing well in education.
The preference is regional. [1] When I took the ACT, many years ago, it was the test the university I was applying to listed first in their requirements.
When I was in high school (graduated 2012), my school recommended we take both, since not only do certain schools prefer one to another, but if you happened to score relatively well on one versus the other, you could choose to only send that one instead.
> if you happened to score relatively well on one versus the other
This should be reasonable proof that the test doesn't test things very well, IMHO, because there are so many factors that go into getting a good score.
I was one of these people -- I got one point below perfect on ACT, but the morning of my SAT, I got into an argument with my mom and got a below-average score.
1. No (nontrivial) test is perfect: we take each with a grain of salt and accompanying context
2. You can take these tests multiple times and use the highest score, reducing impact of one-off ‘off days’ for whatever reason
3. These particular two tests do not claim to assess the same thing (aptitude vs achievement) and do so through different implementations
These factors limit me from tending towards ‘reasonable proof’ on its face when considering the system as a whole.
> This should be reasonable proof that the test doesn't test things very well, IMHO, because there are so many factors that go into getting a good score
Yep, I don't disagree! I happened to get scores that converted to each other exactly according, but overall I think it was good advice to try to use the system to our advantage rather than treat it as some sort of objective measurement.
Spelling this out slowly for the reflexive downvoters, ACT test scores began their decline well before any widespread use of mRNA COVID vaccines which would make them extremely novel in their endochronicity if they had an effect before they were used.
Otherwise, as pointed out by lostlogin, mRNA vaccines have been used in humans since 2013 and studied in animals since 1989 which makes them less novel than widely claimed.
