Humankind started to record its history by images (google for instance about the city of Sefar, Algeria). Nowadays, even in tech we use graphics (diagrams and so on)
This is not my field but even the first letter of the latin alphabet is simply the image of the head of a cow rotated a bit to the left.
> After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Anatoly Lunachersky, the Soviet People's Commissariat for Education made a conscious effort to introduce political propaganda into Soviet schools, particularly the labour schools that had been established in 1918 under the Statute on the Uniform Labour School.[20] These propaganda pamphlets, required texts, and posters artistically embodied the core values[21] of the Soviet push for literacy in both rural and urban settings, namely the concept espoused by Lenin that "Without literacy, there can be no politics, there can only be rumors, gossip and prejudice."[22] This concept, the Soviet valuing of literacy, was later echoed in works like Trotsky's 1924 Literature and Revolution, in which Trotsky describes literature and reading as driving forces in the forging of a New Soviet Man.[23]
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
Soviet Russia also obviously killed people in large numbers if they disagreed with the party line, starting immediately after the revolution. If you kill people who disagree with you while promoting specific state-approved propaganda then literacy is indeed not enough.
That's why free speech and in particular the freedom to criticize and disagree with the government is fundamental.
What matters is that (1) people are able to read, (2) people are free to read what they want, and (3) people have access to cheap nonfiction reading material that is likely to be true and accurate. You can attack at any of these points and reduce the ability of literacy to prevent dictatorship.
Wikipedia isn't a source in and of itself, but a good Wikipedia article will be well sourced.
Count me a skeptic of this reductionist article.
From Eric Zencey:
There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance.
You just used a type of Ad hominem fallacy called appeal to motive fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
With books, some small amount of people read difficult works while most people read beach lit. With phones, some small amount of people are learning at rates never possible before, while most people consume Tik Tok.
I agree that social media may be causing a collapse in society, but not that a lack of book reading is causing societal collapse.
I’m off social media. I don’t even have Safari on my phone usually. I consume Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Substack essays.
It turns out I’m just as able to mindlessly consume this media for hours a day, and although it is not as superficial, emotive or corrosive as X, it is still no substitute for the deep book-length reading I used to do and now do increasingly less.
Literate intellectuals are stuck in the shallows too.
Same with gen-AI. A small amount of people have become autodidacts like never before, while others just use it to replace their own reasoning capabilities, which atrophy as a result. I know someone who self-taught graduate-level math courses using ChatGPT as a personal tutor, and I can confirm they actually learned the material well. I also know college students for whom gen-AI wrote every single word of every assignment.
Any social collapse will be caused by technology further accentuating this bifurcation. The exponential increase of information readily available to us, whether gold or slop, means that the motivated will get exponentially smarter and knowledgeable while the less-motivated get exponentially more distracted, which will lead to unprecedented levels of social inequality.
..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..
Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
..when the tools for creating the content of the virtual world become good enough, all of a sudden you have a new, shared objective world where people can co-create the interior with a facility similar to language. And this is what I call post-symbolic communication, because it means that instead of using symbols to refer to things, you are simply creating reality in a collaborative conversation, a waking-state, intentionally shared dream. You're going directly to the source, avoiding the middleman of the symbol and directly apprehending the craftsmanship of that other person combined with your own, without the need for labels.
Jaron [interview with Jaron Lanier] Wired 1.02 1993
The essay quotes studies showing the leisure-reading prevalence among teens and adults dropping. I do not see how this is relevant at all to "death of intellect and reason". Reading fiction can give a person new perspectives on life, but so could a movie or a manga or radio-show. It's a leisure activity. I'm far more worried about drop in reading and writing *proficiency* overall. Writing proficiently is dropping with LLMs in school, and reading proficiency is worse than the early 2000s. But i don't think this tells the whole story either.
I think the average person reads and writes as much as always thanks to the prevalence of technology. Keyboards, instant messaging, blogs, social media. Writing is easier than ever, and reading is more worthwhile than ever. But the *format* and media has shifted. This shift in format is not reflected when asking people "how often do you read" (people read constantly, but much fewer books).
And to question the very premise further; Reading isn't that brought the revolution in science and intelligence; better storage, spreading and access to knowledge is. That this came in the format of text should matter. If people engage with thought provoking reason through audio or visuals instead of text, what does that matter?
now, i AM worried about some of this. In particular the decline of news quality and consumption, rise in (seemingly) acquired ADHD, and a drop in writing proficiency (which i think is vital for deep thought and contemplation), but this article really does not discuss the issue fairly or well.
I've got a 29-year-old employee from whom I receive texts and emails every day. The grammar and auto-spell word substitutions are frequently so bad I have to respond "do you mean X or Y?", and sometimes so confusing I can't parse their message at all.
>I think the average person reads and writes as much as always
Perhaps, but the writing quality has definitely taken a dive.
Phones are the new default, but they are terrible for long form writing. Moving a cursor to the middle of a section or moving a section around is frankly more effort than its worth. Just send it and clarify later. I'm not saying its a good thing, but i would call it more of a shift than a decline. If you ask them to write a report the writing may spectacular, since they're actually by a proper keyboard and in a format with more strict writing standards.
No, plenty of twentysomethings can competently communicate in writing. There are just a lost more today who are functionally illiterate.
In Ye Olden Days, you don't think the same sorts of miscommunications happened? A look at history (or history viewed through the lens of classical literature) sure makes it seem like miscommunication levels were always pretty high
At least today you can get instant clarification on "do you mean x or y" instead of waiting weeks or months for dudes on horses to move pieces of paper back and forth between you and your penpal
It was a very funny statement because it very much is iteration by any definition, and it's always a laugh when somebody embarrasses themselves by simultaneously doing the same thing they're criticizing. Yikes, right?
I think your meaning was clear, though. So that's what I responded to.
To me it read like a rant monologue about the youth, saying about 4 things but repeated over and over with different words. It's an essay written in bad faith to essay writing.
mm. Perhaps phrasing it like this would help; The article is written in away to appeal to those that already agree with the premise, and dissuade those that don't. 6000 words is on the long side for a blog-post, but not unreasonable for a good essay. This does not read as a good essay, it reads like a preach. Most people that don't agree with the article stopped half way and moved on, and who do we have left in this comment section?
I don't disagree with the conclusion nor the arguments. I disagree with how the authors has written and presented those arguments and conclusions. It could have been 3000 words and still said what it wanted, or it could have said much more at the same word-count.
Writing proficiently is dropping with LLMs in school,
and reading proficiency is worse than the early 2000s.
But i don't think this tells the whole story either.
It's very easy, but also lazy and simplistic, to look at the decline of writing proficiency and equate it with some kind of 1:1 decline in overall interpersonal communication.
People certainly struggle with communication in 2025. It's hard.
But if we are to believe that communication has somehow declined over time, then we must also accept that communication was somehow in some kind of amazing or at least superior state 100 or 200 or 1000 years ago. I see no evidence that is the case. The most casual look at history or classical literature shows those times were chock full of miscommunication foibles, both trivial and world-changing.
Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, began his academic career as a scholar of Medieval history, but his attention soon turned to the Gutenberg press and the rise of literacy (over 3 centuries), and how it changed the way we think. He then applied his theories to radio, film, TV etc.
In the 1960s McLuhan was invited to tour the skunkworks at IBM, Xerox Parc, and Bell Labs where they were working on the early iterations and basic building blocks of what would become the internet we know today.
They showed him their vision for "Peer to peer electronic media", and McLuhan applied his theory of media to the not-yet-realized notion of social media.
He definitely saw it as something that would bring a death knell to the literary age, and recognized that social media was inherently tribalistic. According to McLuhan we would all be "marching to the beat of the tribal drums". And that brings us to today, wherein America is officially under the spell of state sponsored tribalism, and reading in the literary sense no longer holds court as the driver of our discourse and thinking.
The dude skated to the puck a good 30 years before it arrived, and he was extremely pessimistic. Mark Zuckerberg has claimed to be a McLuhan fan, but if he actually understands what McLuhan was saying, that's scary:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
> "Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait."
> "The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens."
There will be some challenge in adapting to this new format but attention remains. We are just not converting this new medium into the best educational content as seen in the declining graphs. People are still hungry for knowledge and information about the world, they are just getting it in a more convenient form and who can blame them? I personally do not engage in any of the endless scroll feeds available today and despise social media. I read books both in digital and physical form and I graduated right near the peak of that literacy chart around 2009.
We just need to find better incentives for content creation and the rest will follow on it's own. Often this can only be done with regulation but what regulation can improve the quality of short form media? It will likely take those who grew up steeped in it to imagine the best way to change it for their own children.
Media is sold in a free market. Are you planning to abolish that? if not, how will you deal with the fact that people are addicted to crap?
First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history.
E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was reacting against. You could also probably make the argument that widespread reading via the printing press led to more anti-intellectualism culturally, as the onus of belief shifted from the elite priestly class to the popular individual.
Secondly, the vast, vast majority of people were not reading complex literature or scientific papers, they were reading the equivalent of Netflix series. Deep, intellectual reading has always been a niche thing reserved for a small percentage of the population.
Thirdly, and I think most importantly: reading is a historical technology. It's not the end-all greatest thing ever invented, never to be surpassed by anything new.
I personally think that audiovisual media is far, far superior to reading in many situations, especially for education - language learning, for example. The problem right now is that we're assuming that short clip-based media like TikTok is somehow the ultimate form of video. It's not, and short attention spans are more due to the economics of media consumption than anything inherent to the video format.
I think we're just very, very early in the development of a new media format that combines the best elements of text, audio, moving images, and other data in a way that is ultimately more compelling and effective than static words on paper. Video, like books, is ultimately a historical technology and not necessarily the end-all of future media.
It's not the end-all greatest thing ever invented, never to be surpassed by anything new.
I'd be very interested to know why you think this.
I personally prefer reading as a way to intake information, because I'm faster and more at least reading a bunch of stuff than I am watching a bunch of youtube videos.
I think audiovisual media is better for most educational things, especially languages and skills. If you're learning Spanish or how to fix your car, I think a video (with audio) is better than a book most of the time. To be fair, there are definitely things better taught via book, but I do wonder if part of the reason why is 1) books have a longer history and 2) watching video is still kind of an awkward experience; I can't easily grab text from inside it or view the entire contents at once, like I can with text.
But more generally, I think audiovisual media just more closely matches the human experience of the world. Sitting hunched over an object looking at symbols is a learned activity, whereas watching and hearing something is more "natural" to people – see for example, how most languages were spoken-only for a long, long time before anyone wrote them down.
Isn’t this the benefit? It’s conducive to abstract thought in a way recorded media is not. (The historical alternative is in-person rhetoric. As we all know, the online version is not substitute for debate.)
The elites were always voracious readers. Mass reading isn’t necessary for civilisation, but it probably is if we’re going to treat the masses like elites.
Since when? All the elites I know spend their time taking expensive vacations and doing too much drugs.
Elites would be powerful politicians, advisors, or big-scale investors that pull actual strings. And these people are pretty universally voracious readers.
From my personal experience, reading is the closest humankind as ever got to holodecks. There is nothing except reading that provides that level of immersion, and there will not be until we _actually_ invent the holodecks.
If I had a holodeck I'd probably use it to sit somewhere nice and well lighted and read a book.
I'm risking engaging in similar hyperbole, so I must stress that they're not too egregious, just mildly misleading in their significance, but it does still put the article into some question.
The x-axes are also over relatively short time periods, presumably to deemphasize massive upward trends in previous decades.
Education systems need to have very strong curriculum about AI use and the necessity of just not using it to some degree to be able to obtain any level of actual literacy or other competency.
Actually education should be redesigned to properly incorporate personalized AI tutoring and as part of that effort provide a supportive environment where students don't feel the need to go around it to cheat.
If the goal is to communicate and solve problems, the technologies will probably be a huge improvement if we can manage them properly.
I definitely do not have the depth of vocabulary that some 18th century readers had, but I am a good problem solver. Probably a more effective problem solver with AI. But kids do need to be trained that they will lose it if they don't use it.
If you look at the extreme amount of video content these days and combine that with the increasing abilities of AI video generation, there may be a trend towards more visual (and often more literal) communication.
I often find that screenshots or screencasts are important for technical communication.
But of course we don't have any visual replacement for the abilities of natural language so I hope we can keep that.
We need a deliberate and effective effort in education.
But we are rapidly approaching the era where your access to AI and robotics determines your labor productivity. So it increases the existing inequalities.
It comes down to the topology of the social networks and how the built environment and belief systems shape that. But the belief systems mostly serve the social groups rather than the other way around. So maybe what happens is determined by group dynamics.
Thank you to anyone who read my ramble.
Some of the wealthiest, most powerful and yes, most productive people of the last decades had no clue how to use a computer or phone, interacting with it through staff.
Remember the folks who were teaching their kids to code ten years ago? How relevant is that today (beyond as a cognitive exercise)? Access to AI and robotics are secondary to other factors. Not the determinative ones, certainly not at the individual level.
Yes. Unless we’re redefining labour to fit a square peg into a round hole, this remains true.
Access to the latest technology is never a sole determinant of productivity in any technological revolution. If anything, it having any relation to productivity is a modern phenomenon.
(Most kids who had a computer in the 80s or internet in the 90s didn’t become wildly more productive for it. They just found new ways to entertain themselves.)
I have no idea what is this magical AI capable of tutoring that you're talking about. It is certainly not any of the AI models we see in the market, which hallucinate systematically and are only able to output remotely valid content if they are subjected to tight feedback loops.
"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."
I'm a college-educated, reasonably well-read person and this is a rough paragraph to get through. Old idioms, excessively lengthy sentences, anachronisms (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?
Especially if you were entering university as an English major, it seems like table stakes to have a conceptual understanding that not all English is going to be in simple, modern terms. That is you're going to be reading books from a variety of time periods and cultural origins, you might need to develop an understanding of those sources.
But even as somebody who likes Dickens' prose, I think his syntax is often a lot more complicated than it needs to be. In that sense I agree that it's slightly difficult at times.
Not "difficult" as in "this really took me a tremendous amount of effort to understand" but difficult as in "I think his syntax is a little more difficult than it needs to be."
(Of course, any sort of art should be understood in context. It wouldn't be reasonable to impose modern expectations on something written 150 years ago)
Well for one thing it was topical for it's time, horses have these little black pad things that sit on their bridle (not 'face harness') to keep them from reacting to things in their field of vision that would be to the carriage driver's left and right (horses have a bigger field of vision than non-grazing non-prey animals like people who want them to go in a straight line without being scared). I had to look up Michaelmas (but am glad I did, it's a Christian religious tradition that likely isn't popular today in the US but probably was a bigger deal in Victorian England where they didn't have a quasi-replacement in Thanksgiving).
So there's all that history, a bit of sentiment on the present. And I didn't even touch on why the passage is good, it conveys a scene, mud splattered and smokey, so pretty much exactly what it intends. I'm not even a particular fan of Dickens or Jane Austen and don't go out of my way to read them. But I understand their value, it seems increasingly people do not and that shows their own gaping hole in worldly understanding.
Edit: Autocorrect
Because they were English Lit students, and the paper was to see how modern students interpret and understand literary modes such as simile, metaphor and their underlying meaning.
Only 13% of adults read at PIAAC levels 4 or 5, so it's not like college degree means that you have maxed out at reading skills. When high reading levels decline, other levels decline as well.
I don't think people these days can be bothered with such nonsense. Though next time I see a blackberry bush I'll think of chucking Satan at it.
And I say that as someone who was forced to do Great Expectations in English Lit. I read the CliffsNotes and passed.
My main memory of the book is Pip was fooled into thinking he'd get off with Estella because he got some money from the convict who went to Oz and thought it was from Miss Havisham in error. And then Dickens spun that out into about a million words because he was basically paid by the word to fill newspaper space. Some of the old stuff wasn't actually that good and there's more competition for entertainment these days.
The immediate goto is always either smartphones (as in this piece) or the world wide web. Other pieces looking at longer term trends might even reference TV (the dawn of media entertainment consumption without intentionality).
These are all focused on leisure: what we do in our spare time, presumably because we mostly read for pleasure in our spare time. What I rarely see highlighted is the growth of the so-called "knowledge economy" & the shift of common "workers" being employed in physically skilled jobs to common workers being employed in sedentary jobs requiring the application of (basic) literacy for most of our days.
Given we spend a lot more time in work than we do at leisure activities this contrast of an increase in (relatively mindless, unstimulating) "literate" activity in work with the decline in (focused, stimulating) literature-oriented leisure activities seems relevant in my mind.
... arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record ...
First, I think this is overly crediting "children" and unnecessarily harsh to the university students. The first sentence of the book proper is, "LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall." It seems perfectly reasonable for an average person today to not know what "Michaelmas" is, but otherwise that's a fairly simple sentence. So I assume the above refers to the first sentence of the preface, which is:
> A CHANCERY Judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the Judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
That's not a simple sentence: ~60 words, with multiple interjections splitting up the actual point: "A CHANCERY Judge once informed me that the Court of Chancery was almost immaculate."
Further, English has wandered substantially over the intervening ~175 years. This criticism seems akin to complaining that college students of 1800 had a hard time reading Shakespeare, when any contemporary child in 1600 could have understood his work (had they been able to read it at all).
Finally, this ignores the advance of technology. Books were, in their day, a huge technological advance. People could only read more because of moveable type and mass printing. Someone in 1600 might have lamented the mass standardization of printed material, saying that it depersonalized the communication of information.
Today, if someone finds Bleak house challenging, an LLM can modernize, simplify, or summarize as needed. We're on the verge of being able to turn it into a graphic novel on demand.
All to say: there's a point to be made about what information people choose to consume, but focusing on how they consume it misses the point.
> Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Moby Dick -- of course the first sentence is about as simple as possible. But extending to the second:
> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
Again, that is much clearer. N=3 and selection bias and all, but Bleak House appears to be the outlier here.
But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold — or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam — or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.
(I'll try to simplify that down to a tiktok loop.)
There is a bit of arrogance in the assumption "literate thinking is the best kind of thinking". Knowledge disseminates through different channels today.
The "non-reading kids of today" are, among other things, having far less unprotected sex, consuming less alcohol and tobacco (although more amphetamines), taking less unnecessary risks (driving, firearms, etc), and being more tolerant of differences in ethnicity, gender, etc.
This article is an example of these alternative channels. Fifty years ago, it was in Postman's book ("Amusing Ourselves to Death", excellent reading b.t.w.). Today, it is read by many people around the world without even being printed and sold in bookstores. Besides, it is a collective experience: its arguments don't just reach individual minds, they also reverberate in this thread.
This post is basically a rehash of Postman's book. I strongly recommend that you read that book. It is a much more solid explanation, although the book predates smartphones by decades.
I dispute the basic thesis. Quoting from Our World in Data:
>While only one in ten people in the world could read and write in 1820, today, the share has reversed, with only one in ten remaining illiterate https://ourworldindata.org/literacy#all-charts
I think recently with smartphones and the like people have switched to new forms of information - youtube, or mucking about on HN rather than reading Dickens but I don't think it's worse.
(Typed funnily enough from the How The Light Gets In philosophy festival where yesterday we had "Roger Penrose - From the Big Bang to the fabric of spacetime and the nature of consciousness..." I don't really see this post literate thing.)
cjs_ac•4mo ago
The present decline in literacy is probably the consequence in a temporary prestige given to other forms of media. We are very much heading into a great crisis, but the old social order where knowledge is valued by the elites will re-emerge once the crisis is resolved. The Second World War emerged from the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s, and the reason why so many people who lived through the war said they enjoyed it was the common purpose that swept away the prior disorder. This is why the 1950s were so socially conservative and repressive.
We live in interesting times, but the world will again be boring.
syntaxing•4mo ago
logicchains•4mo ago
Of course it's going to argue that, it's an environmental studies class. But those environmental changes were global, while changes like the enlightenment and the industrial revolution only happened in a small number of countries that had the political and economic systems to support them.
jkaplowitz•4mo ago
dash2•4mo ago
coliveira•4mo ago
This is circular reasoning. How developed political and economic systems could arise before educational and economic development? They both rose at the same time.
IgorPartola•4mo ago
The only thing we seem to be forgetting is that the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people.
inglor_cz•4mo ago
Looking at various intellectual and artistic hotspots in history, be it Bell Labs or ancient Athens or Florence in the Renaissance or even Silicon Valley today, what seems to matter is the ability to find the smartest people, put them together and let them stimulate one another.
And plenty of such people come from the peripheries. How many Ramanujans lived and died at Fleming's time while not being discovered?
walleeee•4mo ago
Nonsense. The capacities of an organized group of people are very different from the capacities of any individual in it or the averaged capacities of its members. Even an absolute dictatorship where the dictator is resident genius.
Your claim is only correct if it's a dictator with an army of automatons. The claim you want to refute is just as wrong, unless the people follow a strict algorithmic decision procedure, which even the stodgiest bureaucracy only loosely approximates.
Agents and groups have fundamentally different dynamics. An anthill does things no ant can conceive of. Many human organizations filled with smart, well-intentioned people do incredibly stupid things. Etc.
IgorPartola•4mo ago
You can also think of it as “the maximum intellectual capability of the group is limited by the intellectual capability of its smartest members”.
walleeee•4mo ago
If it's true of ants, who we likely agree have not so large a cognitive lightcone as us, surely it is of us. The only way I see for it not to be true of us is to posit a hard cap on intelligence which we are closer to.
There are also forms of intelligence which resist formalization and do not equate to cleverness. For instance, wisdom.
IgorPartola•4mo ago
walleeee•4mo ago
If your point is just that different people have different capacities, then sure, that's true enough. But even so, it's an extremely coarse summary of an enormously complex and detailed landscape.
IgorPartola•4mo ago
I think I am not being clear in what I am saying. My point is that if you have a group of 10k average individuals their collective intelligence will not let them design something like this even though they will have the manpower and presumably the raw materials to build it. But if you add a small handful of much smarter than average individuals with expertise in the relevant engineering fields and they would not only be able to conceive of it as a concept but also design and it and lead the larger group to building it.
This does not absolve the group of needing to recognize those who are the most intellectually capable amongst them and put them into a leadership role. But the opposite is true because you cannot by definition imagine someone who is significantly smarter than you and you cannot emulate it. Collective intelligence of a group is bounded by the smartest person there. Adding more average intelligence to a group will not make it smarter, just larger, and potentially get in the way of the group recognizing the intelligence of its smartest members.
walleeee•4mo ago
> Collective intelligence of a group is bounded by the smartest person there.
I maintain this is false. Who was the smartest person in the Vienna circle? A group of competent, well aligned people is potentially a much more capable thing than the one member with the highest IQ score alone. Collective intelligence is no simple combination of the capacities of its constituents. That is what the anthill demonstrates. The capacities of individuals do limit the capacities of the whole in some way, but it is nowhere near as simple as "bounded by the smartest person". This has a lot to do with the fact that "smartest person in the room" is not a particularly meaningful title absent a precise definition of what intelligence/competence means in your context of interest.
I agree with your point that adding people to an organization does not necessarily improve its capacities. Collective intelligence is not simply additive, nor is it simply bounded by the best individual on any particular dimension
IgorPartola•4mo ago
If you assume a bell curve for intelligence, then it is primarily the people who are two standard deviations and up from median that are driving innovation, assuming the group allows such individuals to do so. In a small group this might be just one person, in a nation of hundreds of millions it would be single digits of millions, etc.
If the whole group is actively hostile towards this or there is a systematic barrier to it, such as the intelligentsia purge under Stalin, then there is probably going to be another factor that is much stronger at bounding the maximum intelligence.
I postulates that this holds true for any group where the average intelligence is close to 100 IQ or any other metric you want to use to designate the median intelligence in the human population overall.
If you get together a group of people who are already all over two standard deviations up from the overall median you will probably get a different calculation for the upper bound because higher order terms will become more significant, such as specialities, age, experience, etc. But when we are talking about societies, you are always talking about comparing to the median. As far as I know something like a median intelligence slowly trends up in humans over centuries but it is slow enough that there aren’t societies where their median intelligence is a lot lower or higher than any other society in existence at the same time.
Ants are a terrible example due to using a completely different intelligence model. They are incapable of recognizing innovation, so even if you throw in a group of Fermat ants into the mix, they will still end up working as just slightly more efficient drones. This fits into the model above as the society being set up with an active barrier to allowing its smartest members to innovate.
walleeee•4mo ago
And yet the anthill does very complex things even though its Fermats might feel their unique talents go unused. This strengthens the case unless you posit that humankind is so close to a universal intelligence limit that we can see its precise contours and can therefore know exactly what can be known and done, and how, exhaustively.
Separately, everything you say needs an operationalization of intelligence. I understand IQ is your proxy of choice. Presumably this measure correlates to innovation in such things as physics and mathematics. Presumably also to innovation in speculative financial vehicles, elaborate social schemes, weapons of mass destruction, and success in the war against nature. Will you adjust your definition when some of its manifestations come into tension with others, or stick with it come what may?
There is no intelligence absent context. Intelligence is a relation between an agent and everything else relevant, with respect to a goal.
IgorPartola•4mo ago
Ants do not feel so it doesn’t matter what the smartest ants feel. A CPU is infinitely more complex than an ant hill in its function, and is equally as predicable. Ants do not innovate any more than a laser etched chunk of silicon. They are a bad analogy to a conversation about innovation.
But I am also explicitly saying that there are ways a society can hamper its ability to innovate. One such way is to not create the organizational structure to set up its most able innovators for success. Another is to try to systematically eliminate them. A third is to separate them so that you do not get the synergistic effects of multiple experts in different fields being able to cooperate. All of these can happen in a society with a low median ability to innovate as well as a high ability to innovate.
The only truly unique thing you get in a society with low literacy in terms of innovation is that someone of very high intelligence as defined not by education but by ability to learn, would not be able to find the education they need to proceed. Before Fermat was a genius of his age he had to learn from some perfectly average people +/- one deviation. If there are no average teachers then your geniuses cannot be recognized as such. You see this same phenomenon in sports. Countries that do not have kids playing soccer for fun produce fewer world class soccer player per capita because there are fewer opportunities for the most talented players to get the experience and recognition. But even so, you can get exceptions. In basketball you still get Yoa Ming out a country that does not emphasize basketball in the same way the US does.
walleeee•4mo ago
If you don't see how the anthill is relevant I'm not sure what else I can say to make it clear.
This argument is circular and, in the case of innovation (as opposed to a better-defined domain of competence like, say, the shotput) egregiously self-defeating. I'm not sure how to help you see that either. So I think we'll have to leave it.
I don't disagree with anything in your third paragraph, for what it's worth, assuming you somehow operationalize innovation, but it's a separate discussion.
I strongly disagree with a CPU being more complex than an anthill. One of these things is a primitive automaton, the other an instance of by far the most advanced technology (to adopt a familiar but limited point of view) in the known universe.
Cheers
bee_rider•4mo ago
IgorPartola•4mo ago
You might bring up something like Bell Labs as a counter example but my point would be that it was a large group of exceptional people and you got synergies out of putting them together but compared to the society in which they existed they were each individually outliers too.
bee_rider•4mo ago
hash872•4mo ago
Eh, sort of disagree. The journey to modern democracy started with centuries of concessions by kings, first to other nobles (Magna Carta, etc.) Then, to other local power brokers like large landowners, business elites, etc. None of these parties wanted one single figure to have absolute power over their affairs & finances, mostly because they tended to make terrible decisions (random wars, taxation, and so on). Early proto-parliamentary systems in the UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan in the 19th century etc. were just a council of local, powerful elites who wanted to check the power of the king. The 'middle class' part came absolutely last
cjs_ac•4mo ago
The US is very generous with its use of the labels of privilege.