Yup. I agree with everything you've said. The quality of discourse has rapidly declined in the social media age as well.

I'm not that old, but still old enough to remember a time period where the technical barriers to even accessing the internet kept a lot of the worse offenders off/out.

It's a sorry state of affairs now.

I think the big problem is that humans have a general tendency towards intellectual lazyness.

The way we educate is increasingly promoting/enabling this sort of lazyness even though the hurdle of accessing the knowledge shrinks every year.

There is just literally zero excuse for not googling "Richter scale" at some point.

This thread has been instructive to me on the lack of general math literacy....

I thought everyone graduated high school with an understanding of how logarithms work.