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by simonw 178 days ago
Much as I love text for communication, it's worth knowing that "28% of US adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above" - Literacy in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Anything below 3 is considered "partially illiterate".

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who cares about technical communication and making technical topics accessible to more people.

Maybe wannabe educators like myself should spend more time making content for TikTok or YouTube!
2 comments
GarnetFloride 177 days ago
Something important to do is to let your audience know that you are only showing them a small piece of the whole, because of the media you are using. With hooks like, if you want to learn more go read this article or this book.
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ryandv 178 days ago
The inverse of this is the wisdom that pearls should not be cast before swine. If you want to increase literacy rates, it's unclear to me how engaging people on an illiterate medium will improve things.

Technical topics demand a technical treatment, not 30-second junk food bites of video infotainment that then imbue the ignorant audiences with the semblance or false feeling of understanding, when they actually possess none. This is why we have so many fucking idiots dilating everywhere on topics they haven't a clue on - they probably saw a fucking YouTube video and now consider themselves in possession of a graduate degree in the subject.

Rather than try to widely distribute and disseminate knowledge, it would be far more prescient to capitalize on what will soon be a massive information asymmetry and widening intellectual inequality between the reads and the read-nots, accelerated by the production of machine generated, misinformative slop at scale.

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makeitdouble 178 days ago
Technical knowledge isn't specifically bound to literacy.

A "dumb" example would be IKEA manuals that describe an assembly algorithm, I could imagine a lot of other situations where you want to convey very specific and technical information in a form that doesn't rely on a specific language (especially if languages aren't shared).

Color coding, shape standards etc. also go in that direction. The efficiency is just so big.

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