Sadly, nope, if you can read at a high school level, there's roughly a 75% chance you are smarter than any rando you meet.

For the last 5 or 10 years, more and more kids graduate highschool with middleschool or worse reading / writing abilities.

People even make tiktoks about going off to college and admitting they literally cannot understand the words in their assigned texts, start going through some kind of literacy crash course...

Some people even make videos like that explaining that even after a Bachelor's or Associates degree, nope, still can barely read.

I am starting to notice this in the slop youtube throws at me that I am sometimes dumb enough to click on.

Somebody reading some article to give commentary on it, and you can just tell they are reading one word at a time, misunderstanding what 15% of them mean, have to actually stop on 5% of the words because those ones they've never read before, and then they start complaining that the author must have just been using a thesaurus... because a few of the vocab words in the article are 8th grade or above.

... I picked up reading quickly, so quickly that when I was in 2nd grade, I was assigned to go out into the hall when I was done with my classwork (I always finished rapidly) and then go help a 4th or 5th grader who was behind in reading skills, go sit with them and have them or me read aloud, help them with words they didn't know, etc.

Everyday, even on the net, I encounter more people who... are beyond graduating high school age, who barely read better than 5th graders with dyslexia.