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.
I love how today actual literacy isn’t even a thing. No one talks about teaching readimg and writing (in the EU, at least). It’s all about financial literacy, digital literacy, social media literacy, hell, even (and bear with me here) AI literacy. Yes, really. There’s probably 800 of these fake literacies floating around.
Whoever thought of this is an idiot. The word literacy means one thing: the ability to read and write (and perhaps understand what you read/wrote). Nothing more, nothing less.
It isn’t just stupid, it’s also malicious. Kids all over the globe are suffering from poor literacy, and instead of fixing the problem you quite literally shift the goalposts.
Why be able to read and consult a dictionary when I can just consult AI or social media to explain it to my borderline-illiterate brain?
When AI services enshittify by raising their price barriers, or when just… infrastructure generally collapses to a serious degree such that many people just literally cannot use them…
Much of Gen Z and A, either reliant on or just totally raised on using AI to do their thinking and work for them…
They will basically go feral, they won’t be able to get their fix, a part of their ‘brain’ will have been ‘removed’, and they will literally be dysfunctional.
And I shouldn’t just single out younger people, though its more prevalent and severe with them, there are certainly many millenials and older who’ve also just given up good chunks of their thinking abilities to AI, which is largely a proprietary service that go undergo a price hike just like Xbox or Netflix.
… I used to think the ending to DX Human Revolution was a tropey cop out, that broke from basically the rest of the game’s narrative and gameplay themes, just a zombie apocalypse at the end of your spy thriller.
Now I realize that was the point, maybe still a bit hamfisted or over the top, but… yep, yep, people become reliant on things they aren’t actually 8n control of for just basic day to day living, and then you actually break that, take it away from them?
Yep, zombie apocalypse is not too far off from what would actually play out.
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.
I love how today actual literacy isn’t even a thing. No one talks about teaching readimg and writing (in the EU, at least). It’s all about financial literacy, digital literacy, social media literacy, hell, even (and bear with me here) AI literacy. Yes, really. There’s probably 800 of these fake literacies floating around.
Whoever thought of this is an idiot. The word literacy means one thing: the ability to read and write (and perhaps understand what you read/wrote). Nothing more, nothing less.
It isn’t just stupid, it’s also malicious. Kids all over the globe are suffering from poor literacy, and instead of fixing the problem you quite literally shift the goalposts.
Why be able to read and consult a dictionary when I can just consult AI or social media to explain it to my borderline-illiterate brain?
When AI services enshittify by raising their price barriers, or when just… infrastructure generally collapses to a serious degree such that many people just literally cannot use them…
Much of Gen Z and A, either reliant on or just totally raised on using AI to do their thinking and work for them…
They will basically go feral, they won’t be able to get their fix, a part of their ‘brain’ will have been ‘removed’, and they will literally be dysfunctional.
And I shouldn’t just single out younger people, though its more prevalent and severe with them, there are certainly many millenials and older who’ve also just given up good chunks of their thinking abilities to AI, which is largely a proprietary service that go undergo a price hike just like Xbox or Netflix.
… I used to think the ending to DX Human Revolution was a tropey cop out, that broke from basically the rest of the game’s narrative and gameplay themes, just a zombie apocalypse at the end of your spy thriller.
Now I realize that was the point, maybe still a bit hamfisted or over the top, but… yep, yep, people become reliant on things they aren’t actually 8n control of for just basic day to day living, and then you actually break that, take it away from them?
Yep, zombie apocalypse is not too far off from what would actually play out.