We're learnding.
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
It’s not hyperbole, this is an actual serious issue in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have high enough reading skills to extrapolate and cross reference data from things like text books and journal articles. Something like 40% of American adults can’t read well enough to comprehend multi-step prompts (e.g. they struggle with stuff like bus schedules). About 15-20% of American adults can’t read at a basic level, very simple things like medicine bottles. Depending on the survey these numbers can vary a bit
Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language but the main reason is that we’ve simply eroded education quality for decades. I work with teenagers who are in high school and can barely throw together a coherent email. Statistically, most adults don’t read for pleasure at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Look under “literacy rates” section
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you mean president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You forgot my title of Five Time Ultimate Smackdown Champion scro
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Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
Ah I see. That makes sense.
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Using former Nazis wasn't because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.
Agreed ... but in order for the US to push through their rocket program, they needed scientists and researchers to develop, test, build, test, retest, and test some more all of the applied science that had been developed. The country needed to build an entire community of thousands of professionally trained technicians, scientists, engineers, professionals ... and with them had to come teams of administrators, academics, trainers, bureaucrats, office workers ... and with all of them had to come entire groups of trained builders, workers, electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, planners and all the people that came with ... and all that had to be supported by an industry that needed to build and develop all the things that had to be needed to get this monolith moving, which meant that all these corporations and businesses needed their own teams of professionally trained people.
It was a massive investment in education in order to get the ball rolling in industry to build the rocket program. It wasn't just building rockets ... it was building an entire industry upon industry upon industry to get to the point of building a single rocket that could launch anything into orbit.
The reason why any of it happened was that the government heavily invested in educating and training an entire population to make it all possible.
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
“Terrible” is a threshold that can move, though. You can bang on about “half the world is below average” until you’re blue in the face but you will still always miss the point that the average should be much higher than it is and the spread should be nearly as wide. There will be a rough limit to intelligence at some point but the US, for all its resources and money, still seems more interested in finding the lower limit than the upper one.
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As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
Pretty sure the smart folks waited till they could provide for their kid well before finding out they couldn't even have any. Implying that even if they did that kid would have been outnumbered by the mass breeding of fuckwits who's only objective in life was rawdoggin after a good time.
It actually feels crazy that I know dudes who emulate the idiots from the beginning montage almost exactly. They didn't used to be that way, it ramped up the last couple years
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As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
I don't think that the movie was proposing that the issue or solution is eugenics based. I would argue that educated people are probably able provide a better education, and that uneducated parents are less likely to be able to provide their children with a quality education.
I don't specifically remember Idiocracy really going into depth about "passing good genes".
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In case you were wondering why we're losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
You have entire corporations, nation-wide that are backed by religious nuts and racists, entire state-sized organizations of assholes paid from the bottom-up, and unless science and education has the same backing, we will lose.
When's the last time a rock band was labeled a "science band", but you can name four or five christian bands without even listening to them?
There are entire record companies and publishing houses that do nothing but spread more of it, interest groups in the billions of dollars that circulate faith and blindness. Even philanthropy, and a yelling preacher on every corner, sometimes across the street from one another, hospitals, nonprofits, foundations, you name it.
Christianity and Judaism is so overblown in support, we shouldn't expect anything less than absolute ignorance. Look what's pushing it.
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That's higher than I thought. Aren't newspapers written at around third or fourth grade levels?
In healthcare, all of our education material for patients is at a 5th grade level.
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87.4% graduate high school, then people stop being forced to read books and those who never liked reading get out of practice
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Yeah, no shit. gestures generally toward the DC area
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You have entire corporations, nation-wide that are backed by religious nuts and racists, entire state-sized organizations of assholes paid from the bottom-up, and unless science and education has the same backing, we will lose.
When's the last time a rock band was labeled a "science band", but you can name four or five christian bands without even listening to them?
There are entire record companies and publishing houses that do nothing but spread more of it, interest groups in the billions of dollars that circulate faith and blindness. Even philanthropy, and a yelling preacher on every corner, sometimes across the street from one another, hospitals, nonprofits, foundations, you name it.
Christianity and Judaism is so overblown in support, we shouldn't expect anything less than absolute ignorance. Look what's pushing it.
I mean math rock is a genre, in fairness
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As unpopular this may be: With some, or probably some more, there are limits to what can be achieved with care and education.
Maybe, but those limits are extremely far from what we currently achieve....so there is that to consider.
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If you want some light horror reading, check out /r/teachers.
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I saw that "3min read" tag on the screenshot and thought, "Not for 54% of American adults."
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87.4% graduate high school, then people stop being forced to read books and those who never liked reading get out of practice
Stop that! You and your logic, no logic allowed here, just hate
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In high school, I always thought the kids sounding out words like "the" were just taking the piss and doing it on purpose. I see now that was genuine.
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I mean math rock is a genre, in fairness
Time to program something nasty and tricky or tweaking in a tight part: put on the math metal and figure it out.
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People want easy solutions, like "Have more people be born smart" instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like "Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population"
more like rich and powerful people want stupid masses
stop blaming these issues on individuals when the whole system is setup to fuck them into this mess
anymore than individuals can fix our plastics or fossil fuel issues
