this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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chapotraphouse

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[–] Nakoichi@hexbear.net 62 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

This explains a lot of the behavior of the lost libs that stumble in here like the guy yesterday demanding exhaustive sources and when provided with such simply said "I ain't reading all that".

More than 80% of Americans are functionally illiterate

[–] doleo@lemmy.one 35 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I ain’t reading all that

Is the kind of anti-intellectualism that I'm seeing plastered all over the internet. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but I swear that people are getting increasingly pissed off with having to read anything.

I was watching a streamer the other day, and the chat was spamming "UP" every time someone chatted more than 3 lines. They were reveling in it.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Is the kind of anti-intellectualism that I’m seeing plastered all over the internet. Maybe it’s confirmation bias on my part, but I swear that people are getting increasingly pissed off with having to read anything.

I think this strain of anti-intellectualism is actually a lot better than what we had in Bush II.

The strain is passively anti-intellectual, not aggressive like the Bush II years. I think that a large portion of it especially from younger folks is really about the fact that the doors are closing, and that being curious or educated doesn't actually benefit you in the way that it used to. In essence Bush II anti-intellectualism was based in a perceived slight. It was a "oh you think you're better than me?". Conversely, "I ain't reading all that" to me is more of an admission of intellectual capacity mattering less in people's daily lives.

They very much lines up with elite over reproduction, and the labor crisis that's happening globally including in AES countries like China where they have a huge unemployment issue with recent graduates. I think it's reasonable (but ultimately wrong headed) to deduce based on what's happening in the world that education isn't an unalloyed good. It's expensive, it's difficult, it doesn't have the same economic benefits it did 10 years ago let alone 20 or 30, and it makes you feel bad about yourself and the state of the world.

Intellectualism has been sold as a means to and end, rather than something intrinsically valuable, so it's not a surprise that the foreclosure of the future is leading people to anti-intellectual conclusions.

[–] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Ah anti-intellectualism:

frothingfash : I am a white man reactionary, that means I’m special and it’s a gross insult that I have to even exist in a world alongside anyone else!”

doomjak: “I don’t think that’s true, you’re just being mean for no reason!”

frothingfash: “You think you’re better than me? Fuck you elitist! I’m BETTER THAN YOU!!!!”

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 month ago

This was 60% of people on TV in 2002.

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[–] Nakoichi@hexbear.net 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Especially in the case I referenced where it was some racist western lib blindly assuming anyone saying positive things about China's internet regulations must be a paid CPC asset.

Cuz you know the "free" western internet is doing so great right now with the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg having a duopoly, rampant human trafficking and a thousand crypto scams popping up every day.

[–] TheSpectreOfGay@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago (4 children)

no for sure, they definitely are. there was even a meme (the nerd emoji) that got used sometimes to reply to people who typed too much. i also notice a lot in chats, people will send a long thought through many messages instead of just one. it's very strange.

seeing someone say "i aint reading all that, i ran it through chatgpt and here's why it's stupid" would actually surprise me bc it's slightly more effort than im used to seeing agony-shivering

[–] MizuTama@hexbear.net 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

What gets me is ChatGPT yaps its fucking ass off like it's trying to reach a word minimum.

So like????? What do they mean when they say they put it through chatgpt???? Often, they do it for simple statements or analysis to so it's not like it is breaking it down for them either as at least that would make sense. It's just as long-winded but is also a bottle deep into benedryl by design so it makes shit up as it fundamentally has no grasp of reality and they're having it read text and explain it for them????

[–] TheSpectreOfGay@hexbear.net 19 points 1 month ago

chatgpt reads the abstract and then rewords it to be way more confusnig, this is saving me time

[–] T34_69@hexbear.net 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

but is also a bottle deep into benedryl by design

Lmao I've never heard that expression before, that's hilarious

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[–] Self_Sealing_Stem_Bolt@hexbear.net 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

More than 80% of Americans are functionally illiterate

Westerners. Kanada isn't any better. And "ai" is making it so much worse.

[–] GoodGuyWithACat@hexbear.net 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] Sleve_McDichael@hexbear.net 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

smdh even Hexbears are falling behind in their Maoist Standard English proficiency

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[–] iie@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago

in that guy's case imo it was more psychological shutdown than a reading issue.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

to expand on this, according to PIAAC, 1 in 5 yankees cannot reliably answer questions of this level

[–] sexywheat@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'm sorry what

Edit: How is this possible, I mean

[–] buh@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

can you summarize this post, it's too long for me

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[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (13 children)

I feel like I've encountered this phenomenon enough times to discern a pattern but not enough to figure out what's going on. The phenomenon is this: some medium blogger gets linked on here writing a fairly cohesive critique of Americans and I click on some of their other posts to discover their politics are a little off.

In this case I can't tell you if Iron Council is tendentious and bad but I'm really wondering where the hell this brainwave is coming from:

What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art. We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

In conclusion, yes I think literacy and reading comprehension are in crisis but on the other hand the author of this blog is a weirdo.

[–] Real_User@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Yeah his article about why married women should be more grateful about getting to do more housework is so dishonest. He's criticizing a different substack article, insisting that his carefully selected quote isn't leaving anything important out. He immediately just straight up lies about what's in the rest of the article. Soon after, he cites one study, using two charts from it and conveniently neglecting to mention that the rest of the study he's leaving out refutes his argument.

Can't trust a conservative, folks! classic

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[–] HarryLime@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is the only piece of this author I've read and didn't check anything else they wrote

[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago

I'm not blaming you or anything, I'm just kinda intrigued that it keeps happening.

[–] PapaEmeritusIII@hexbear.net 9 points 1 month ago

political priors

mgs-alert Rationalism brainworm spotted!

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[–] PKMKII@hexbear.net 26 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.

This is the more troubling bit than not recognizing archaic English (I get why the one kid assumed Michaelmas was a name). Not being able to recognize that one has presented a contradictory argument speaks to a severe deficit in reasoning. I’m not sure if that’s a failure of education or a reflection of a society that presents introspection and self-criticism as weakness.

However, I do want to push back a little on this:

In the end, the lesson is clear: if we teachers in the university ignore our students’ actual reading levels, we run the risk of passing out diplomas to students who have not mastered reading complex texts and who, as a result, might find that their literacy skills prevent them from achieving their professional goals and personal dreams.

This begs the question, what are the professional goals that are stymied by not being able to deconstruct Dickensian prose? Is this something that major publishing houses care about when hiring people? If these kids are able to graduate and then go on to have successful careers despite being below what’s considered “standard,” is it possible that the standard is simply irrelevant to “real world” demands? That these kids are simply prioritizing what their “professional goals” demand rather than being incompetent?

[–] ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I get why the one kid assumed Michaelmas was a name

Just to force Hexbears to learn what it is, Michaelmas is the festival of Saint Michael on September 29th, and thus Michaelmas Term refers to a (university) fall semester.

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[–] DefinitelyNotAPhone@hexbear.net 26 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Dickens feels like an odd choice to display functional illiteracy, given that while it's technically written in modern English it's also marred with the cultural baggage of Victorian England; "wonderful," for example, is meant in this passage to mean that it produces awe or astonishment, but that's not how the word is used by anyone in modern times. The dinosaur portion is part of a larger metaphor using Noah's Ark which is only really going to pop to someone with decent familiarity with Christian mythology, and worded in a way that still takes someone literate a moment to digest and understand it.

I'm not entirely sure the form of the study helps either; most of the responses seem like they threw a passage at an undergrad and immediately demanded their interpretation in a clinical (read: atypical and somewhat uncomfortable compared to normal reading) setting. How many of the readers would have re-parsed the passage given another moment or two and understood it? Furthermore, the opening passage isn't even particularly important to the plot, and it seems like the vast majority of people reading understood at the very least that "it was a shitty morning in London" is the point here. Is that functional illiteracy, or simply skimming purple prose that isn't all the relevant to the story?

This example feels only a little removed from laughing at undergrads for not understanding why Homer spent so goddamn long in the Iliad charting random Greek soldiers' entire family trees only to kill them off a breath afterwards, and calling them illiterate for not grasping cultural context from literal antiquity.

[–] buh@hexbear.net 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I figured the dinosaur thing was meant to allude to primordial or primitive imagery, but I wouldn't have guessed it had to do with something like noah's ark

[–] Chana@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago

"The waters" is still a common way among Christian nerds to refer to the deluge, i.e. God's most famous genocide. But only among the worst nerds.

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[–] HarryLime@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The whole point of the test is that you're supposed to be able to parse these meanings anyway. It's supposed to be relatively challenging.

[–] DefinitelyNotAPhone@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

At what point does the test become "do you have very specific historical knowledge that is functionally trivia for any real world use case?" though?

[–] HarryLime@hexbear.net 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They don't need to have the knowledge memorized. They had full access to google and a dictionary to look up anything they found confusing, and couldn't even do that. The test was of their ability to figure out a somewhat difficult text, not of their historical knowledge.

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[–] forcefemjdwon@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago

That's just what high literacy - which is expected of English majors, especially by their third and fourth year - requires.

According to ACT, Inc., this level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension section of the ACT (Reading).

In 2015, incoming freshmen from both universities had an average ACT Reading score of 22.4 out of a possible 36 points, above the national ACT Reading score of 21.4 for that same year.

[–] forcefemjdwon@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago

A third of senior and junior English majors were found to be completely helpless! That is not acceptable!

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I read the linked study, they weren't testing for immediate comprehension, but rather what tools a reader will utilize and how much effort they were willing to put in before giving up. The testees had access to the internet to look up phrases and titles that they didn't understand, and as far as I can tell there was no time limit. The "problematic" group included people who thought that there was meant to be a literal dinosaur walking around in the mud, and like half of the people in it never figured out that the setting was a court of chancery.

[–] Homer_Simpson@hexbear.net 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] Chana@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago (3 children)

So muddy it makes you think of dinosaurs.

I'm a good writer.

[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago

Specifically, being muddy makes you think of dinosaurs because scientists of your time hadn't figured out plate tectonics yet so your idea of the history of the earth was a weird mix of early paleontology and bible stories.

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[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don't think this is new. I once encountered on an online political debate forum a guy who was constantly misspelling things and couldn't (wouldn't?) understand metaphors, hyperbole, or analogies. Someone would use a word like "proliferate" and he would assume it meant "pro-life."

He revealed later he had graduated with a degree in English after topics around literature came up. This was over a decade ago and Spark's Notes helped many people scoot by. Not surprising colleges are becoming diploma mills since so many of them always have been.

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[–] MizuTama@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Ngl the dinosaur bit tripped me up until I recalled wonderful could be indicative of astonishment (USain reporting for duty! amerikkka ) then everything clicked and flowed pretty seamlessly.

I don't know how none of the people in the excerpts picked up that it wasn't literally about a dinosaur in the street (or the fact they only recognized it was an animal and not a dinosaur, even when I had no fucking clue what it was meant to imply I still understood it was figurative. The fact none of them realized it was setting a scene was even more asinine. I felt illiterate reading this fact I needed a dictionary for some of the terms was disappointing (I read too much low-effort fantasy slop), and think the bar for "competent" was far too low.

I took some English in college and none of it really required older texts though so I could see how it could be overwhelming. Frankly, I am mildly concerned that I wouldn't have been able to parse it if not for the fact I studied philosophy and their prose is so much worse (in the difficulty and often in the enjoyability as well). Thinking of my fellow amerikkka friends, I have I believe 2 that would probably be able to read this competently though most of my friends from other countries I know definitely could parse this, including many that learned English in their late teens.

I'm young too, so this means I likely had the same or worse literary education as everyone interviewed, the only difference would be my major and the fact I do read for leisure (or as a hobby for the gamers in the chat). (Edit: I also know a bit of a second language and can read texts in it but my proficiency is still low so I am used to strain while reading, maybe there is an acclimation effect there?)

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[–] Carcharodonna@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

I’m sorry but this article really rubs me the wrong way. The example used (the intro to Bleak House by Charles Dickens) doesn’t seem like it would have a whole lot of cultural relevance to the sample of students tested who were from public colleges in Kansas. If you’re the kind of person who already reads Dickens and/or watches British period dramas like Downton Abbey, you’ll probably perform much better in this exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are functionally illiterate or lack reading comprehension skills in a general sense. If the reading sample in question was something like Trainspotting, would it mean that Scottish readers have a unique talent for reading that others don’t have? Of course not. It just means the others aren’t Scottish.

A better example imo would have been something more universally difficult, like… A Clockwork Orange or Finnegan’s Wake, but in reality it’s hard to remove cultural bias completely. Or… You know what? Fuck it. Everyone should just be forced to read Hegel and be considered illiterate unless they can completely understand each and every sentence. How does that sound?

[–] MizuTama@hexbear.net 23 points 1 month ago

Everyone should just be forced to read Hegel and be considered illiterate unless they can completely understand each and every sentence. How does that sound?

Based

[–] HarryLime@hexbear.net 18 points 1 month ago

Not everything you read is supposed to be easy! That's the point of the test! If you're majoring in fucking English, you should still be able to read a moderately difficult and archaic text if you have full access to your phone and a dictionary, regardless of how "culturally relevant" it is.

[–] forcefemjdwon@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago

Everyone should just be forced to read Hegel and be considered illiterate unless they can completely understand each and every sentence. How does that sound?

Yes, communists should strive to build a society where the average person is able to comprehend complex philosophical prose! Turn the esoteric exoteric!

[–] CocteauChameleons@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Idk why but its funny to me that you posted this after an english major shot up some Israeli ambassadors

[–] duderium@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Before I even read this article I just want to say that I read hundreds of pages of bleak house, but couldn’t finish it because I just thought it was really boring.

Edit: okay I’m reading the article now. I always liked the beginning of bleak house though. It’s depressing that so few people seemingly have the ability to enjoy it.

Spoiler alert, but I remember that there’s a character in this novel who proves he can read by writing a single word on a chalkboard, and then later in the novel he just randomly explodes, I think.

[–] buh@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago

no metaphor left behind

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