[WaltPurvis]

I'm sympathetic to the concerns motivating this essay, but the charts related to test scores are ridiculous. The y-axis is so compressed it makes it look like performance has dramatically plummeted over the least 20-25 years, but the actual declines are basically 1-5%.

[lucideer]

This. I follow John Burns Murdoch on social media & normally find his work great so I was really surprised that the most egregious "graph crimes" shown in this article were visualisations created by him.

I'm risking engaging in similar hyperbole, so I must stress that they're not too egregious, just mildly misleading in their significance, but it does still put the article into some question.

The x-axes are also over relatively short time periods, presumably to deemphasize massive upward trends in previous decades.

[dash2]

But we don’t really know what the scale is. Like, a 100% reduction would presumably be very serious, completely unfit for skilled labour? so what does a 5% reduction mean?

[mallowfram]

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992,

[isodev]

But the point remains the same, we shouldn’t be seeing a decline at all…

[WaltPurvis]

The "point" the article is trying to make is that there is a decline in literacy so severe that it means "the end of civilization" -- a strong claim, to say the least, and one that demands rather stronger evidence than a 1-5% decline in various measures of literacy/thinking. (Granted, test scores are not the only evidence he has marshaled.)

[mallowfram]

It's simply the end of the the symbolic era's low meaning load. The sentence is dead. The metaphor. Whatever low-grade semantics we suffered under is coming to a close and a new form/format of meaning-units are needed.