171–180 of 222 posts
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Mostly writing emails and being shocked no one read them. I’m now a two bullet point max kind of emailer.
Same here. Now if I need to ask someone about something over email I only include a single question per email Because you can be sure that only one will get answered and the rest are just ignored.
Why would anybody be surprised by this? Look around. People, by and large, are not very capable to begin with, poorly educated, and disinterested. In an earlier age, it was common for newspapers to target a 7th grade reading level.
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What's the difference between voting against one's own interests and voting with one's conscience instead of one's wallet?
None if your "conscience" is installed by capitalist propaganda.
Wikipedia happily reports that North Korea has a 100% adult proficient literacy rate. Cuba has a 99.9% rate. Brazil 98%, all leaps and bounds beyond any western country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_... The US is certainly behind much of the world in education, but these metrics are really hard gauge accurately. Diving in to where these numbers come from and how they compare to the rest…
Learning to read Korean (even North Korean Hangul) takes about a weekend. They can easily get 100% literacy rate by the end of kindergarten. That’s the benefit of a logical writing system that has few exceptions.
"Spelling bees" are largely an English language phenomenon. If you can pronounce a Spanish word, you can likely spell it. You might miss an occasional "h", but that's about it.
Relevant classic from 2009: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-rea...
Those examples suggest normal people compare poorly against what I’ve seen from GPT-3, so I have to wonder why? Is GPT-3 actually better, and the tests saying it’s still worse than human because the humans GPT-3 was compared against are WEIRD[0]? Or are the examples in your link cherry-picked? [0] Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; although in this case “educated” may be sufficient: https://en.m…
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This is the key observation: these surveys aim to determine the general English literacy of the American workforce. You don't have to be a US citizen or a voter, or even an English speaker to work in this country. A more accurate metric would be "prose literacy in the individual's at-home spoken language," which would probably yield a significantly less drastic picture. Perhaps not the best one, but nowhere near as e…
English is the language of commerce and government. My fluency in Tagalog is great, but has minimal impact outside of a small community. Even if you speak a different language at home, school is primary taught in English with exceptions for Spanish or other languages in some regions. My dad taught English at a community college a decade ago, mostly to soldiers returning from the war. They were mostly smart, motivated…
A corollary to this observation (adults, or a least young adults, can learn really fast, and even faster than adolescents) is that we need more formation options for adults. You should be able to leave school at 14, work a trade, then stop in your 20s to integrate college and learn something new. And college could be a more open place with ex-plumber, ex-cooks and ex-electricians in it. The best software engineer my age i worked with worked on HT lines for 3 years.
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The parent is right though. All a "learning disability" is is a requirement for a different approach from the instructor than the one-size-fits-all nonsense that we push down poor kids' throats as "education". The lack of ability to benefit from this farce in millions of students isn't surprising; and it can be absolutely address with better instruction and individual approach. I say this as a former instructor, math…
> All a "learning disability" is is a requirement for a different approach from the instructor than the one-size-fits-all nonsense that we push down poor kids' throats as "education". Tell that to my Dyslexia, I had many mentors growing up, and was taught by many people using many different approaches. I still can’t spell for shit, and my phonic processing is still garbage. No about of different teaching methods is g…
The biggest problem for me has been noticing spelling mistakes in variable names. I can't find the bug yet it's just two letters swapped.
Oh and the frustration some people have when they spot an error.
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The source is the same one linked in the post you're trying to slam. The URL has changed from http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_question.asp , as written in the post, to https://nces.ed.gov/naal/sample_items.asp . You can easily find the question by using the Text String Search field. > I was genuinely unsure as to the correct interpretation. Who's to say You're arguing at the level of this handless guy now. https://xkc…
You seem to be confusing your argument for my own. I'm the one claiming that the text is ambiguous and shouldn't be, you seem to be outright denying that it's ambiguous at all? You're the handless guy feeling smug about their innate knowledge that the author's intention was "Acceptable answers include statements such as:" rather than "Acceptable answers include a statement such as:", I'm the top-hat dude calling you…
> I'm the one claiming that the text is ambiguous
Between the handless guy and the top-hat dude, which one is claiming the text is ambiguous? How well-grounded is that claim?
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HN is just heavily moderated. It’s the same dumpster fire as the rest of the internet, just with dang’s yay/nay filter applied.
It also is important to point out how much self censorship exist on HN. It can be interpreted as tact, group think, civility, and so on. Personal restraint has vanished more and more in the last few years. Many here would argue it is a result of social media platforms.