Yep, me too.

Its really nice how its built on the At protocol too. Like no need to create an other account somewhere and if the main project closes I can still get my texts, etc. I love it

And the second thing is, literacy is a skill like any other. You need to work it, otherwise you will loose it.

That’s probably why 20% of people with a doctorate DO NOT HAVE a level 3 in literacy.

Why do people love columnists, radio host, poscasters and political streamers so much¿ Because they need someone else to guide their thoughts, otherwise they’re lost and are unable to form an opinion on a topic.

Level 3 is being able to read a news paper without struggling btw. Level 4 is being able to read literary texts and level 5 is being able to read and interact with lengthy philosophical arguments.

(I’m summarizing)

1% of the population reaches level 5!!!!

Most people are at or below level 3.

That’s what’s scary. The best method to teach knowledge might depend on the kid, but we can’t just not teach kids what the meaning of words is!

This method ignores learning the meaning of words, and focus solely on teaching kids how to infer. But you can’t infer if you don’t know enough of things from the words around.

Inferring, is a backup strategy to knowing! But we’re not teaching kids knowledge anymore!

There’s different ways to teach the knowledge, but here the teaching isn’t about the knowledge, but purely the inferring method.

It’s missing the tree for the forest. Good readers are able to infer, because they know a lot of words which they learnt the meaning of in other context.

The problem tho isn’t that using contextual clues is in of itself bad. You can infer that a chick is probably linked to a chicken in some ways.

The problem is that reading is knowledge base.

Oh yeah, it’s the same for everything tbh.

We are the result of a series of very complex interactions. Blaming kids is just the easy thing to do, but it completely misses the point.

Much like how the death penalty is not an end in and of itself.

uhhh this actually reminds me a lot of how LLMs function at a basic level too - predicting tokens based on proximity & context, etc 😬 ...so we're teaching kids to read like AI & saying AI level is good enough

They simply extrapolate from their own experience, and thus because they haven’t been taught about the fact that words do in fact hold a meaning they cannot imagine that others do differently.

It explains so much…