Like, in a practical sense? Do you have any stories or examples from your life?
I am certainly not immune to this. I struggle to read theory and find it difficult to understand. ADHD does not help.
I love to read but also struggle to read theory, and then the smug theory obsessed leftists use that as a gotcha.
Leftist theory is extremely dense reading and mostly in language from 100-170 years ago. Of course it’s mostly impenetrable to the public of today.
To be fair, I struggle hard with reading anything not in current language. I can’t do Shakespeare, for example. Have a hard time with poetry too.
I had a brain injury, and then I have ADHD possibly from the brain trauma or possibly prior, and I suspect I’ve had autism all along. Being female is bullshit, growing up in the 90s girls couldn’t have those things so we just ended up having our needs neglected.
The way it has manifested most clearly in the situations I’ve encountered it is a basic difference in approach to writing and reading as concepts. They don’t see writing or reading as a way to communicate, they see it as a puzzle they have to solve by following rules, so that they can return to communicating once the puzzle is out of the way. Unless they’re in very casual/online settings, or very motivated to find specific information, they avoid the puzzle because it’s annoying.
It means they are easily propagandized to and won’t have the critical reading skills to realize it
That clip of that Kik Streamer fascist Aiden Ross trying to whole-word-read “fascist” and then googling the meaning and then still being puzzled why someone would call Trump that.
Once, Andrew Tate asked him questions about World War II. I could maybe forgive someone for not knowing that de Gaulle was the leader of France, but the only leader of the major Allies/Axis Powers he knew was Hitler. When asked who the leader of Russia was, he said “I’m guessing Putin’s father or grandfather”.
Putin’s grandpa, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook for some time, an we all know cooks really rule the world.
Good lord
When asked who the leader of Russia was, he said “I’m guessing Putin’s father or grandfather”.
That sounds like a bit.
Nah, he’s that stupid. He once played porn on stream knowing that half his viewers are children.
Kik Streamer
When I first saw this, I laughed my ass off and then cried because this motherfucker is an idol to so many people.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I had a roommate who grew up in a poor farming community. He has dyslexia but the school had no special education funding to address that. As a result he grew up completely illiterate and stayed that way into his 30s. He passively absorbed libertarian ideas from the media he consumed, but lacked the ability to cross-check any of it. I remember him giving me a history lesson from a Call of Duty game.
Jesus I’m so fucking glad that didn’t happen to me.
I can talk humanities and social sciences at a graduate level and am comfortable with the physical side of trauma medicine, but STEM subjects are really difficult for me for more or less the same reason. Shitty public/Catholic schooling meant I effectively lost out on a meaningful primary and secondary science and mathematics education. Now I’m a scientific horticulturist because I thought horticulture was a fake science that I could sneak my way into because I’m decent with plants. It isn’t though. Outside of ecology, it’s the ultimate interdisciplinary physical science. I’ve had to learn mathematics through analytical trigonometry and calculus but even basic algebra barely makes sense to me. Chemistry and physics are totally lost on me. I spent those preteen/teenage years building an intuitive knowledge base for the subjects that interest me but I feel the effects of an underfunded public school with any kind of super technical field that I never had childhood exposure to. It fundamentally doesn’t click.
I have dyslexia and legitimately didn’t learn how to read until I was about 13 years old. I mean, I got by on memorizing clusters of familiar looking phrases. Vibes-based reading. Oh and lots of cheating and lying about homework.
Two decades later, I still struggle compared to my peers. But I have had the privilege and luck to learn strategies to make up the difference.
I’m also an elementary school teacher. There’s only so hours I can try to teach my students to read. One of the biggest determining factors for reading ability/comprehension is how much vocabulary children are exposed to at an early age (0-4 years old). Reading to young children is crucial for language development, reading ability, and a slue of related skills. I don’t know enough about linguistics to know this for sure, but I’m assuming most of my students have parents with restricted vocabulary. And probably just not talked to enough as babies. Something just has to have affected their kids cognition in pernicious ways. Them getting COVID 8 or 9 times in their lives probably hasn’t helped either.
So the other week with my fifth graders we’re doing intro geometry stuff. I said something like, “A cylinder is just like the rectangular prism. It’s just that its base is a circle.” And like okay, I’ve been trying for half an hour trying to distill the absolute cluster fuck this caused in my students brains.
“It’s similar to this coffee mug. See? It has a circular base and it’s a prism. I know you’re thinking a prism has to look like the rectangular prism. It might be helpful to think of the cylinder as a circular prism.” I said, exasperated.
“What are you even saying?” a child asks rhetorically.
I eventually have to say something like, “Listen, if you can’t understand this it’s a skill issue and kinda cringe.” There’s a million little things that are hard to put into words how utterly dysfunctional some of these kids brains are and will be later in life.
Oh and I have to speak to these children’s parents on the reg, which is its own sort of hell.
To be fair, at least personally, I learned the word ‘cylinder’ long before I learned ‘rectangular prism’. Maybe because the latter is usually called a cuboid or box, while there is no simpler word for a cylinder.
They know those concepts from previous grades and learning. My example leaves out weeks of scaffolding.
cuboids are what they call people on flatlander 4chan
Tell them prisms are where bad guys go; if they ran a prism, do they want their prismers to be in a cylindrical cell or a rectangular one?
What’s it like talking with their parents?
Probably like talking to the trolls from the hobbit
Tbh you also about lost me when you started taking about rectangular prisms, too, and I’m a 30-year-old former voracious reader. So. Maybe take it a lil easier on them, and come up with simpler verbiage when introducing new concepts?
I think there is a significant difference in two skill affinities at play here. Vocabulary and spatial visualization are both important to solidifying geometry skills but some people just tend to have a lot of difficulty projecting 3-dimensional shapes in their minds, whether or not the words to describe the concepts are in their lexicon.
I personally feel like my Nintendo 64 helped me form the wild geometry and visualisation skills that I have. There’s some studies that show a strong correlation. I can visualize a running petrol engine in my mind, create structures and understand the engineering/physics of it’s supports. I don’t do it for a living anymore, but I’m really good at building things without a blueprint. ADHD probably helps with this too.
Avoid prism at all costs
Maybe show them how you can project a line segment perpendicular to its direction to make a rectangle, then show how you can project a square into a rectangular prism. A visual could help.
Can you use the Microsoft Office graph function? I think they can show bar graphs as a 3D cylinder/rectangular prism.
Why not use a 3d model viewer or something like tinkercad
I thought that would be ideal, but teachers are busy and I don’t know if op has the time to learn it.
Great suggestions, thanks.
My mom once stated in a FB post that socialism was evil, when I asked her to elucidate “It just is!”
They can sound out words and know what most common words mean in isolation but their ability comprehend the meaning of a text is very basic, if present at all. Reading a short story, being able to summarize it and comment on themes, conflicts, character motivations, metaphors, allegory, how they relate to the story or certain characters are generally beyond them. Reading a political article and reading between the lines to get past the writer’s bias is completely beyond them (tbf they would never read an article, they would watch a video or look at memes on facebook). That said, they have little to no ability to think critically so whatever authority figures beat into them when they were young becomes their worldview and everything that contradicts it is seen as an attack on them and society.
I had someone I know ask me what was wrong with the Korean PM declaring martial law since he was doing it because of a communist invasion. The article just repeated what he claimed he was doing and this guy hadn’t thought about whether that was an accurate statement on his part. Just didn’t occur to him that an official statement from a politician could be false.
He’s not coincidentally a huge Chud with a lot of beliefs about a (((cabal))) running everything he doesn’t like.
I legit think the only way to save these people is to very carefully word socialist theory in a way that they can understand through facebook level memes. But then you have to worry about the authority figures that actually can read seeing through it.
I don’t know that re-education is actually possible in this case, tbh.I legit think the only way to save these people is to very carefully word socialist theory in a way that they can understand through facebook level memes
Impossible, leftist memes must have multiple paragraphs of text at minimum
The issue is also that these people actively do not want to learn, because learning actual history means learning that they are the bad guys. I think real re-education can only take place in a Chinese-style re-education camp (depicted wonderfully in one of my favorite movies, The Last Emperor).
This was what I was going to say. The idea of an author of a text having a bias is alien to a lot of Americans. Like if you say that Harry Potter is a liberal fantasy about not changing anything and defending the status quo, there will be someone telling you “uh no, it says in the book that it’s about fighting Voldemort”. Just a lack of ability to do anything more than a surface level read.
It means they have a difficult time parsing Parenti quotes. They can read it aloud, and they can tell you roughly what it’s about, but they have difficulty following and comprehending the argument being made.
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970.
“I used ChatGPT Bazinga to write this message”
Sometimes you have to be brought back to reality and realize that the vast, vast majority of USAmericans have not grappled with materialism, thus nearly all the connections they make are like a 6th grader writing out their 5 paragraph essay for the high stakes exam that determines if their school gets funding or not.
US self made brain drain is going to hit the country like a comically large boomerang, it already has essentially.
Yeah, even if a person gets an undergrad degree they still have the capitalist brainworms unless they poison them with theory. Reading and writing education in the US is so formulaic as to be worthless. People are taught to follow a small set of rules and if they don’t follow the rules, they fail. They are not expected to think. Even so, many people refuse to read or write anything, either paying others to do it for them or just turning in some AI slop without taking a single look at it.
And these people are armed to the teeth
How has it or will it impact the US? With America’s money can’t they just attract immigrant intellectual labour with high salaries?
Yes and no. We used to actively court immigrant intellectuals, now we’re accusing every Chinese intellectual of espionage and frothing at the mouth to deport anyone darker than freshly fallen snow. People with advanced degrees see what’s happening in the US and are choosing to go elsewhere.
brain drain is going to hit the country like a comically large boomerang,
To where?
Slightly more seriously, the people who can actually do things will go to countries where they can actually do them. The US ripping the copper wire out of everything will reverse any sort of intellectual dominance that it once had.
Reading at a 6th grade level is reading for plot. Just like, what happened? Who was there? More advanced things like subtext, metaphor, and unreliable narrators come later.
I found this online the last time this topic came up: https://www.oxfordonlineenglish.com/english-level-test/reading
Go ahead and read the story, and imagine that a lot of people cannot read and understand it.
There’s also this article about how many kids are taught to read badly: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ (amusingly, also available as a podcast)
What does it mean practically? Bad things. If you haven’t read 1984, give it a go and think about why the authoritarian state benefitted from a diminished language.
so lets go a bit more in depths on the topic, what other lessons did you get out of 1984?
what other lessons did you get out of 1984?
that i should sport a mustache if i want to be taken seriously
Aside from the seminal “Shake It Off” (which itself has been analysed by scholars to death), 1984 shows Taylor Swift’s writing prowess with bars such as
“Now we got bad blood/ You know it used to be mad love.”
oh shit i’m 20 years overdue on that book report!
their site design is knocking my reading level down a couple grades
Not GDPR compliant, the disagree button just says fuck you you must agree to our cookies to read this plain text
I don’t know how that test compares to grade level. It seems like a test to determine one’s CEFR level, 20 correct answers out 20 gave me C1. It doesn’t really say what it’s based on, but it does encourage you to buy their product.
Ok actually, this seems to suggest B2/C1 is about 6-8th grade level and C1 is 9-12: https://wida.wisc.edu/news/wida-model-online-scale-scores-linked-common-european-framework-reference-cefr
I missed one and I got B2!!
Coincidentally, I answered
that her English was perfect instead of very good.
Some of those were a tossup for me. perfect or very good? months to adjust or years?
It was total inference too. From this section:
At first, she thought it was difficult, but when she finished school, she could already speak quite fluently and understand almost everything she heard or read.
Does almost say “not perfect”? Not sure…
Worked for a major insurance company in rural Alabama. Had customers who couldn’t even write their own name, all of them were black people living in an incredibly poor area. None of them seemed particularly dumb or something, they just didn’t have access to education because of segregation. This wasn’t that long ago (2010ish), but a 70 year old today was school aged before desegregation in Alabama. Especially in rural areas that didn’t enforce it for a while.
I think a lot of people ignore the effect this has on stats like this.
But racism no longer exists we elected a black president!
Do you have any stories or examples from your life?
A middle school textbook is pretty basic stuff. Think of all problems, blunder, mistakes, accidents, etc happening all over the US every day that are caused by the average American having difficulty understanding anything written at a middle school level or above.
With the rise of the internet along with it’s dark side and the expansion of right-wing media - maybe it was enviable that a repulsive republican like Trump would be president not just once but twice. And maybe it’s no surprise that huge number of Americans fall prey to conspiracy theories and snake oil salesmen like RFK. A large percentage of Americans hate vaccines and think they cause disease.
My worry is that not only will the problem not get fixed - it will most likely get worse over time. There is a concerted, bipartisan effort to ignore the problem. The GOP likes an uneducated public. Trump even bragged about it. The democrats will remain unwilling to even acknowledge the problem because they think the public will lose faith in American exceptionalism, the American dream, etc.
Trump even bragged about it
What did Trump say?
At least he loves himself
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Work emails have to be “dumbed down” to get co-workers to respond.
If I send the fully detailed email I want to, explaining what the situation is, what actions I need them to take and why, I get ghosted 9/10 and have to waste time getting their attention.
If instead I send one sentence emails I can at least get a response and back and forth conversation going. The majority of my co-workers have difficulty parsing anything more than like 2 paragraphs for relevant info.
I work on an app that’s pretty complex and requires a lot of back and forth between devs, customers, and the people who do all the training/sales. I’ve had A LOT of success using numbered bullet points instead of writing normal sentences and paragraphs.
Something about the numbers makes them want to read it in order instead of skimming and it being broken down and labeled lets me respond with things like, “great, what about the 3rd bullet point?” Instead of having to repeat things. Plus most of my coworkers are in Texas so they love bullets.
I have to agree hard with this, something about paragraphs says “chatgpt made this” and it’s probably safe to assume it’s long meandering non-sense stuffed with word salads, fluff, etc. and a bit at the end granting yourself an honorary PHD in early 1900s English literature. My friend even once told me they go off on unnecissary tangets and annecdotes that add nothing.
- Bulleted lists are awesome
- numbers aren’t even necessary for most of the value
- caveat: unless order strictly matters
- nested bullet points are awesome for grouping sub-thoughts
- my friend told me unnessary tangnts as nested bullet points are great because you can include them anyways but it’s easier for fast readers to skip over in a safe organized manor.
- still an info dump, but human parsable and navigatable
- faster to go through, like an indexed database
- Texas Delenda Est
i mean, that’s emails. no one wants to read emails.
Not just the volume of content, but also modifying syntax and verbiage.
“Parsing? What’s that, a vegetable?”
I really dislike writing a long email that contains in very simple text everything that is required of them, maybe some of the background, and I either get ghosted or only the very last thing (or very first thing) in the email gets responded to. Usually from clients rather than coworkers.
