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Reading Is Magic

samkriss.substack.com

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Re: Reading Is Magic

#11

Post by pessimizer »

pdonis wrote: post #3
aidenn0 wrote: post #2

> The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refu…

> The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back! More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that…

> he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.

These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.

This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs in order to assign every death under communism as a death caused by communism. It's not even intellectually dishonest, it's not intellectual at all.

If Stalin didn't kill enough people for you that you still feel the need to inflate the numbers, it's an indication of how many murders you're willing to excuse for your preferred system: "We only killed 50 million!"

For a salient example, see the "60,000" protestors killed in Iran. What's a few exploded schoolgirls in comparison to that?

Re: Reading Is Magic

#12

Post by alrmrphc-atmtn »

65 wrote: post #4

What the author fails to understand is that merely consuming text is not the be-all-end-all of being an educated citizen. I am wary of trusting an author who is screaming from the rooftops about how the bad thing is coming, how the world sucks so much more now. It's my opinion that writing is by far a more effective way to understand the world and the nuance in it. You could, theoretically, watch a video on YouTube,…

To be fair, author's point is more nuanced than "kids these days". He traces an evolution from: (i) an overly conservative but reality-based oral culture, to: (ii) a reality-detached and turbulent text-based culture, capable of envisioning our current technological era, back to (iii) another overly conservative oral culture. To me, the perceived threat seems to be how this second oral culture won't be based on direct experience of the real world, but on other people's (and AI's) interpretations of the former: taking the worst parts of both previous cultures (i.e. you can't think outside the box, and your box isn't even real).

Re: Reading Is Magic

#13

Post by vzaliva »

> Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world.

Not really.

According to Nielsen, 59% of Russians read at least weekly. High, but not the highest in the world, and behind China:

https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/commentary/2017/maj...

Several European countries have a very strong reading rates, some exceeding 70% of adults reading books annually:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

Re: Reading Is Magic

#14

Post by pdonis »

pessimizer wrote: post #11
pdonis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back! More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that…

> he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives. These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died. This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist olig…

> These were previously peasants still under feudal lords.

What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.

> Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.

And you think the communists taught the peasants to read for the benefit of the peasants? It is to laugh.

> This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs

I'm not ignoring them at all. Where did I say that it was perfectly okay for tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs to kill people?

Indeed, if you look at how societies under tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs are run, they basically have the same problem I described: one person, or a small elite, at the top thinks they know enough to run an entire society. But they don't. And their attempts to do it cause massive human suffering and death.

Re: Reading Is Magic

#15

Post by lapcat »

pdonis wrote: post #10
lapcat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive. Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion, especially since you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person? > Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real. Bu…

> Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion Because they hadn't had the same experience--yet. > you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person Not fearful, suspicious. > that's the crucial question! You don't think it's possible for both things to be true? That literacy caused significant cognitive changes, and that the psychological dynamic I described was in play? I don't see how those…

It's possible that the villagers were suspicious of Luria. It's also possible that the collective farm workers were suspicious of Luria. Don't you think it's possible for both of those to be true?

The question is, what explained the difference in behavior of the two groups with regard to Luria's questions? I don't see how suspicion is a plausible explanation for the difference. The villagers were clearly bold enough to talk to Luria, instead of avoiding him completely. They were also bold enough to refuse to entertain Luria's scenario. That could be considered a form of resistance to the Soviets, no? Given that the villagers were so bold, why would they even be afraid of entertaining the scenario in the first place? Are you claiming that they knew the answer to the question yet refused to say it? If so, why? If not, then the issue seems to be a failure of imagination rather than a matter of suspicion.

Re: Reading Is Magic

#16

Post by saghm »

aidenn0 wrote: post #2

> The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refu…

Yeah, I don't know why they couldn't just use made-up locations rather than ones that exist and didn't fit the intended question.

Re: Reading Is Magic

#17

Post by saghm »

lapcat wrote: post #8
pdonis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the villagers who were not forced to change their lives They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments. > Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized? They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive. Note that I am…

> They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive. Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion, especially since you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person? > Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real. Bu…

There's a difference between "I think this person might be up to something, but I don't know what" and " I know exactly what they're up to and it's in my best interest to avoid becoming an obstacle". Not all fear is the same.

Re: Reading Is Magic

#19

Post by herdrick »

tripdout wrote: post #9

I actually don’t understand the meaning of that sentence in Dickens fully either. > 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. Why does “as if the waters had but newly retired” mean there’s a lot of water (and thus mud)? “As much mud as”…

> Why does “as if the waters had but newly retired” mean there’s a lot of water (and thus mud)?

It doesn't. It means there's a lot of mud. It might help if you had the rest of the paragraph in front of you. It sets the scene for us with a bunch of sentence fragments -- bullet points, we would say. Here's the beginning of each of them:

    Michaelmas term lately over...
    Implacable November weather. 
    As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired... 
    Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle...
    Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. 
    Horses, scarcely better
... and so on.

And yes, modern audiences aren't attuned to biblical references.

Re: Reading Is Magic

#20

Post by pdonis »

lapcat wrote: post #15
pdonis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion Because they hadn't had the same experience--yet. > you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person Not fearful, suspicious. > that's the crucial question! You don't think it's possible for both things to be true? That literacy caused significant cognitive changes, and that the psychological dynamic I described was in play? I don't see how those…

It's possible that the villagers were suspicious of Luria. It's also possible that the collective farm workers were suspicious of Luria. Don't you think it's possible for both of those to be true? The question is, what explained the difference in behavior of the two groups with regard to Luria's questions? I don't see how suspicion is a plausible explanation for the difference. The villagers were clearly bold enough…

> It's possible that the villagers were suspicious of Luria. It's also possible that the collective farm workers were suspicious of Luria. Don't you think it's possible for both of those to be true?

Sure. But that doesn't mean that "suspicion" always has to lead to the same behavior. "Suspicion" doesn't exist in a vacuum. You have to look at all the factors involved.

> The question is, what explained the difference in behavior of the two groups with regard to Luria's questions?

And the answer is, there were multiple factors involved, and trying to pin it down to just one is a fool's errand.

> Are you claiming that they knew the answer to the question yet refused to say it?

No, I'm saying that Luria's claim that the only reason they gave the response to the question was a cognitive difference between them and the collective farm workers who had been taught to read, is way too simplistic. And more generally, that Luria only looking at that one aspect of the situation--the possible cognitive effects of illiterate vs. literate--and ignoring all other salient differences between the two groups--like the fact that the villagers hadn't yet been forced into collective farm work by the Soviet government, while the farm workers had--is way too simplistic.

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