Like, in a practical sense? Do you have any stories or examples from your life?

  • prole [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • SamotsvetyVIA [any]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970.

  • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • Tom742 [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • prole [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.net
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        7 hours ago

        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
    • Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Not just the volume of content, but also modifying syntax and verbiage.

      “Parsing? What’s that, a vegetable?”

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    I recently heard this from someone. Does anyone have a link to the recent research indicating this? My reflex is to be immediately suspicious of narratives along the lines of “everyone is stupid,” especially in online communities with fringe political beliefs.

  • FishLake@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    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.

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        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.

  • GrosMichel [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      12 hours ago

      Since no child left behind was passed in 2004 and the common core standards that came not long after it. I graduated HS in 2007 so I mostly missed all that bullshit and only got a little bit of standardized testing.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      I imagine a lot of the lib discourse of this either avoids the education funding model (rich areas get better schools) or views it as either inevitable or good. If you’re a “middle class” lib in a rich area, maybe everyone around you hasn’t gone to a school with very little funding, everyone around you has gone to uni etc.

      Still intentional.

      • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 hours ago

        Extremely intentional. Maintains class divide, keeps the “middle class” in check by letting them know if they question anything they’ll get kicked down a few rungs on the social ladder.

  • john_brown [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    It means that a large part of my job is just copying and pasting things that have already been sent to clients because they straight up do not read everything they’re sent even if it’s just three or four sentences in a paragraph. This has gotten worse since Covid. Loads of these people are business owners, too. I can’t imagine working for them, it must be a fucking nightmare.

    edit: It also means a lot of clients balk at text communication entirely insisting that it’s easier to explain something over the phone. Inevitably, the thing they absolutely needed to monopolize someone’s time for can be expressed in a single fucking simple sentence.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      So, when I think of “text”, I think of speech, audiobooks, film, as well as literal text etc etc. For instance, reading the Parenti quote and understanding its meaning would be the same as listening to someone say the Parenti quote and understanding its meaning.

      Which I thought this was about. If a politician says something, the ability to parse the layered meanings (usually, “this is the public thing I’m saying” and “these are the interest groups I’m signalling loyalty to”), and not like… Being able to read cooking instructions in text but being able to follow cooking instructions in a tiktok.

      • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 hours ago

        What’s funny is I have a much easier time following text directions than video ones, unless it’s something that I need to visually see to understand.

        If you gave me a text about the civil war vs sent me some YouTube documentary about it, assuming both were well made, I’d prefer the text.

        • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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          1 hour ago

          Depends, for me. Instructions I prefer text, cruise entertainment that I don’t have to reflect back on immediately, probably other forms

      • john_brown [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        I think the inability or unwillingness to actually read and process everything presented to them probably applies to the speech of politicians as well. They’re not paying attention to everything being said much less analyzing it critically.

        • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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          2 days ago

          I feel like some processing is going on. They understand that the speech is signalling loyalty to interest groups, but they don’t actually remember the words said and also mistake the loyalty group being signalled (hence the “leopards ate my face” phenomenon, at least partly). This isn’t critical analysis, the belief that “politician is saying that for me!” and “politician is saying what we’re all thinking!” is the barest bones of processing. They do engage a bit more energy if a politician says something they openly disagree with.

  • spacecorps_writer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    Years ago I wrote here using an alt about how I had yelled in public at one of my chud neighbors because he put a trump sign on his lawn. I stalked him later on facebook (which I no longer use) and saw his writing about the encounter. I could barely understand what he was even talking about. This is a white boomer who works as a school bus driver. Becoming a school bus driver now is super hard actually, it requires six months of full-time training/education where I live, but I suspect that he got into school bus driving before all of that, because his writing looked almost like he had just smashed his keyboard with his hands. No punctuation, many spelling and grammatical mistakes. I remember he wrote “I’m” when he should have written “I am”—it was something like: “He doesn’t know how nice of a guy I am,” but he wrote it “He doesn’t know how nice of a guy I’m.” This guy also speaks with a heavy accent and only in short, simple sentences. I’ve worked as an ESL teacher for years, and I tell students now—many of them are perfectionists—that they already speak English better than some native speakers.

    I don’t know what level his literacy is at. I guess he is barely capable of communicating in writing and also able to sign and cash checks and buy things at the grocery store?

    Another story: I work in a blue collar field which requires us to enter about four houses each day. 95% of houses have absolutely no books at all. Of the remaining 5% of houses with books, the vast majority are only bibles and cookbooks. 1% has books that are mostly for decoration. Another 1% or so has books that appear to have been read. I have only found a handful of houses with communist texts. Most of the houses with books that seem to have been read are just filled with liberal nonsense. (One Mormon landlord I met, who owned so many houses I think he was confused about the number, had dozens of Mormon-themed books in his basement, including even one book about overcoming doubt about Mormonism.) A coworker and I once entered the very rare American house that seemed to have hundreds of books. My coworker (white, in his thirties, has a high school education at best) didn’t even notice them. I guess I just found this stunning. I was fascinated with the books’ existence and wanted to examine them all, even if they were almost certainly all liberal nonsense (the owners were retired academics, one book I remember seeing there was something like “Hitler and Stalin”), but my coworker was still just glued to tiktok on his phone (and not communist tiktok). He’s actually an okay guy. He so desperately wants to be a normal American, but he has two trans kids whom he seems to love, so it’s basically impossible for him to be as reactionary as he would like to be. I talked with him for about a hundred hours when we worked together, never revealing that I was a communist and always avoiding obvious Marxist language, and only made modest progress at best. When we finished working together a few months ago, he had expressed interest in voting for RFK. He had also never heard of long covid and seemed to be concerned about it when I mentioned it. Then he went back to normal. As for me, I have trouble watching videos to learn things because they’re just too slow, sometimes even if I set them at double speed. I prefer reading, although I do listen to a lot of books and podcasts, although I’m usually listening while I’m doing something else. Not to denigrate learning from videos since I know they can be useful and some people really get a lot out of them (especially when it comes to learning blue collar shit), but in my opinion, a random book is going to have a lot more information than a random youtube video.

    • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      12 hours ago

      Oh man. I’d love you to judge my bookshelf. I have a bunch of half read fiction books from popular authors as well as short story compilations, I have a bunch of Harry Potter books (1-5, 6 and 7 came out when I was in college, and this was pre JK Rowling being a dick), some classics and nursery rhyme children’s books, a couple of George Orwell’s, a bunch of Rhode dahls, and then… I have books about the patriot act, about blackwater (the military contractor running wild in the Middle East), some anarchist writings, some hustle culture design related books (I tried…), a Hebrew Bible and some books about Judaism (I was raised Jewish and am ethnically Jewish), books about art history, and then a bunch of snowboard and skateboard magazines.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      You’d have been disappointed in my house. I tend to give away the books I actually like and read mostly on e-reader nowadays (but I only do like a few books a year).

  • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      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.

    • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        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. curious-marx I don’t know that re-education is actually possible in this case, tbh.

        • buh [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          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

        • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          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).

  • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.social
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    2 days ago

    I’m going to be honest, there was a ballot measure on this year’s ballot that I had to read and break down, and idk what my reading level is but it’s more than a 6th grader. I can see how the average person can easily get bamboozled with the way things like that are written.

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      my first election as a snotty teen i had to learn what “eminent domain” meant in the booth, and of course despite taking and passing high school civics i had no conception of why it would be important.

      • prole [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        And in some places they won’t allow you to have your phone out at all, so you can’t even look it up on the fly or keep a note on your phone. Even in states that require in person voting, sample ballots with explanations should be sent out weeks ahead

    • stigsbandit34z [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      So much of the minutiae of government/politics is left out of the lexicon in favor of clickbait headlines and 24/7 entertainment politics

      Makes sense why you struggled imo

    • prole [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Yes! Sometimes I wonder what would pass if it were written more plainly. Oregon voted down a measure that would only increase taxes on companies making a lot of money and then distribute that money to citizens. Like wtf how could that not pass?

      Then they DID vote for a measure that allows the state legislature to impeach members. Literally giving up our power to vote for who we want and letting the politicians kick people out when they feel like it is ridiculous. I bet the first time someone gets impeached it will be a leftist/progressive and not some fucking piece of shit from east Oregon who is literally trying to become Idaho

  • Beaver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    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.