I live on the edge of my city’s Chinatown (Oakland, California) and it’s an important part of the local culture. I’ve lived, worked, and studied with Chinese/Taiwanese nationals, and if they weren’t there I’d feel like something was missing.

I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.

The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to fit their own cognitive circumstances, and one generation’s metric is at best an imperfect match for another—“cognitive capacity” can’t be objectively measured.

Cats and similar animals are adapted to specific environmental niches, but humans are generalists. One of the drawbacks of being generalists is that we’re not specialized enough to fully subsist on any single food source.