Adding in words that aren't on screen, misreading percentages (reading out 0.25% as "25%"), and replacing on-screen words with whatever takes their fancy.

I know the American education system gets a lot of stick, but I didn't know it went as far as "if you don't know what a word is, just vibe it".

It’s one thing for a curriculum to fail to teach children to read.

But for the curriculum to teach children to *cover up that they can’t read until it’s too late*—that’s why they got away with selling it for 30 years. Even teachers didn’t know how badly they were failing.

"When I see a word with my human mind I never have more than 67% certainty of what word it is. Computers can easily beat that and level us up so much"

learning about this makes the fact that some ai proponents insist that llms being predictive isn't meaningfully different from how the human mind works make sense. theyre wrong but maybe that is how they were taught to think?

Reading the article (which I hadn't done - shame on me) - this explains so much why EVERYTHING is video now. I learned to read in the early mid-70's where everything was "hooked on phonics". NO WONDER the generation(s) behind me want videos not words.

Is this why I now read current news articles and go "WTF did I just read"? It's like a f'ing stream of consciousness and not "here's how it started, this is want went on (you know, the facts), and this is the outcome as it stands now"?
/1

"130 million Americans 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 years old lack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level." This comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. It's definitely not a joke and I thought it was too.

Oh my god. I just looked it up. Suddenly a lot of...everything...is coming into focus. People have no reading comprehension because they can't read but think they can?!

ok one last post -- oldheads are always going to "why is the web dying.... how can we get the kids invested in the free and open web"

bro the kids can't read. that's why the web is dying. first things first

how did i go so long not knowing we were literally teaching people to read wrong. i knew something wasn't right but jesus christ www.apmreports.org/episode/2019...

With alt text.

"well martin luther king jr gave a speech, so giving speeches is how you change the world"

Well, I dunno if you read up on him, but he did a lot more than that.

there was this person I used to know who once told me how super important it was for us to 'raise awareness' about topics. I never got a straight answer about what that did.