join forces to do what?

bluesky is a twitter clone, it’s not a comment board or link aggregator.

Same. You can’t write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.

They refuse to read anything that’s in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don’t you dare make it a compound sentence.

A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads… they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are ‘too many words’.

A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I’m overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can’t just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.

I used to teach. My lazy students told me I was an arrogant prick too. They usually got Cs and would leave me angry reviews about how stupid my course was and how dare I make them try hard because what is the point I was going to give them a bad grad because i didn’t like them personally.

My students who did the readings, showed up to class, wrote good papers, to enjoy my class and usually got As.

Weird how that works. It’s OK if you don’t like to read man, but don’t go around generalizing that your lack of drive and interest in the topic necessitates that it’s a waste of time for everyone else.

I would guess you don’t run marathons either. Are people who run marathons wasting their time too? Or should they just take blood dope?

Amen to that. I thought the first Dark tower was great, but they kept getting… longer and longer and pointlessly so.

I feel the same way about Murakami too. I read his novels and was confused why people liked them so much they were so long and annoying. Then I read his short fiction and was like ‘oh he’s actually good’. He just needs to cut out the filler.

Bingo.

I studied abroad in Canada and Germany… the mentality there was not like that. It was far less hostile to education and learning generally. People in Germany used to compliment me for reading books and think it was good thing. In America, often, it’s considered negative and anti-social to read. It’s insane.

it doesn’t. what i disagree with is your premise that reading books is impossible and too time consuming to be doable by anyone.

It isn’t.

where are those terms from? i am not familiar with the idea of passive vs activity vocabulary, sounds interesting.

the underlying assumption you are missing here, is a political one.

That better reading skills would create a better public voter base would who would vote democratic or more progressively.

That’s a projection based on the current stat, which show that generally, democratic voters are higher educated than republican voters and/or the assumption that a literate public is a good thing.

And TBF the USA founders based a lot of the constitution on the presumption of a educated well-informed public as a foundation for it’s architecture.

So in the liberal sphere, an uneducated, less literate public is a political threat both towards conservatism, and an eroding on the American political project.

And a lot of praise of the USA model in the 18th and 19 centuries was precisely because we were one the first nations to have a public education system and were were such a highly literate nation.

There are also economic concerns here. A more literate/educated public is generally more economically productive.

And a lot of our ‘educational slide’ has been a product of the last 30-40 years.

when you don’t know things, the things you don’t know don’t exist.

it’s cognitively easier to be dumb than it is to be smart.

just like it’s easier to sit on a couch all day watching TV eating processed foods, than it is to run a marathon and cook healthy food.

It’s not a matter of IQ, it’s a matter of money. Marathon runners are 80% college educated, and make 130K per year, and come from families that are college-educated and wealthy.

Marathon runners don’t come from working-class poor rural families.

Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.

I mean. I worked in public policy for a few years. Most of the policy makers, the politicians, and their staff… can’t do any of that either. Despite the fact most of them have multiple degrees.

But they sure as shit can shout about how stupid it all is and now their gut feelings about taxation are more important than the policy paper a taxation economist writes about it after years of doing research on it. When our highly educated professional politicians can’t pass that standards, I’m not really going to fault the broader public who have a high school diploma at best, for not being able to do so.

There are a lot of brilliant people in our government… but nobody is listening to them. The majority of my highl educated highly literate peers here in Boston… also don’t listen to them. They just ‘know’ that all taxes are bad. mmkay?

So what are you mad about? that you had to read books in English class?

Why were you taking english class if you don’t want to read books?

Are you angry you had to do engineering problems in engineering class too? Sounds like it.

There has been a major cultural shift in the past decade, starting in the early 2010s towards creating ‘safe spaces’ at universities, and students refusing to learn critical thinking skills and replacing them with quasi religious dogma, of a leftist political bent often. It is very new that this type of thing is going on at universities.

Relatedly, grade inflation is also rampant again. 60% of Harvard undergrads get straight As last year. in 2005, 25% of of them did. Failing or getting bad grades is basically impossible at universities these days unless you are deliberately negligent. Showing up and making minimal effort usually gets you a B or higher. Because being lazy and getting a C would ‘traumatize’ a student these days, so it’s not allowed.

There are some great books about it. Coddling of the American mind is probably the most popular.

Also students don’t study anymore. Average study time is like a dozen hours a week now. It used to be 30+ 2-3 decades ago.

I fail to see the point of any of what you are talking about.

You weren’t taking English classes, what do you care about the workload in them?

right, anyone who reads books that aren’t engineering is an idiot, right?

So what makes me stupider, my minor in mathematics, or my minor in music? because both are ‘useless’ fields.

I was in college 20 years ago too. I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn’t hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn. I probably read 500 pages a week on average.

Your presumption is wild. You basically think because you didn’t do the work, nobody could, or should do it. You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude, esp in college. In my AP English class we read one every 2-3 weeks.

Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it’s an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn’t read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd? I’ve definitely encountered plenty of those people in my book clubs, which is precisely why I don’t do them anymore.

I live in a city full of very liberal very educated people.

a huge chunk of them think books are wastes of time and are angry they were forced to read so much during their PhDs/masters/JDs.

I’ve been on many first dates with a science PhD who tells me reading fiction is stupid and dumb and if I’m reading it should only be for career productivity or self help therapy crap. And oh, btw my degrees in humanities mean I’m a stupid idiot who wasted years of my life reading stupid crap books.

It’s insane.

but when you realize these people hate learning, and only like money, it makes a lot of sense. their degrees/educations were not thinks they wanted to do or enjoyed doing, they were brass rings they had to leap through to get money.

listening to harry potter audio books isn’t going to make anyone more literate.

becoming more literate would require listening to audio books that challenge one cognitively.

most readers aren’t doing that. they mostly read crap that is easy and re-enforces their existing viewpoints.

just look at best seller lists in audio book or paper book. lots of crap.

Now who benefits from a poorly educated populace?

they give people a passage at a certain reading level and see if they can answer questions about it correctly.

just like you did on your SAT.

as the reading level advances, fewer and fewer people can comprehend on it and answer the questions correctly.

It’s very 90s. Younger people don’t really enjoy it that much because it is really dated/period specific.

I tried to show it to my 18 year old nephew and he got really upset about how ‘bad language’ they used.