[ngriffiths]

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.

I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.

[atmavatar]

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today

Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?

In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern.

A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion.

A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.

[throwaway2016a]

> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?

This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.

In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.

My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.

[Balgair]

> In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.

No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.

[throwaway2016a]

Is it? I thought the point was to learn. Most reading is just busy work that doesn't actually advance the learning objectives.

[Balgair]

What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do credit work in the first place, granted. But in terms of the classes, none of the readings were ever pointless. If anything, we never had enough time to even do the readings that we really should have - the courses should have been longer. If you are seeing the readings as just busy assignments, you really need to talk with the professor and try to figure out if you're in the right class or not.

[throwaway2016a]

My undergrad was in computer science and my master's is a MBA. Both from good schools (think top 50 not top 5).

I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean throw 12 on the floor and 3 are fluff, I mean, take a 12 page case study and 3 of the pages are not adding value.

Articles are even worse because the pay is often by the word and there are min lengths to get into the print edition.

Speaking from experience. I actually wrote a book for a major publisher and the main metric that determined how much I got paid was page count. We had a page count decided before the first word outside of the proposal was written.

[marcus_holmes]

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.

I'm not sure it matters anyway.

I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points.

I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points.

I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM.

If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos.

The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.

We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.

[JumpCrisscross]

> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies

The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.

[marcus_holmes]

Define "power".

If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are.

But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely.

The next generation are just further along on this curve.

And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing.

It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are

They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.

[marcus_holmes]

I'm more thinking of Dickens - long run-on sentences, with points stretched over sub clauses. It's difficult, and that was the pulp of the day.

[GeoAtreides]

>long run-on sentences

long yes, run-on no.

[ngriffiths]

So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it

[raddan]

> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.

Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.

Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.

The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!

[marcus_holmes]

> The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible

Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)

I dunno. I totally see the point that losing the ability to read and write long-form text is a loss to civilisation. But I also see civilisation as a constantly changing thing, and trying to freeze or stop that change is futile and counter-productive. If the price of moving to the next stage (whatever that is) is losing long-form text, then OK, let's do that, painful as it is.

I still read books. I think I'm in a minority because most of the people I talk to about books seem to listen to them rather than read them. I find this somewhat ironic - humans had a rich, vibrant, oral storytelling ability and culture that was completely destroyed by the printing press. We used to be able to remember huge numbers of stories, and there were professional storytellers. And then we learned to read and write, and that destroyed our ability to remember that much. We have books to remember them for us.

Likewise it used to be common for families to play music and sing together of an evening, before TV or Radio or recorded music. It's still not uncommon that people play a musical instrument, but it's not as common as it was, and it's a rare family that plays or sings together. Instead we have access to all the music we ever need. I don't know if that's better, but the music certainly is; I can't play anything for shit.

[xethos]

> Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)

Sure, that's why this [0] XKCD was made - getting pulled off on a geeky sidequest, automating something that has (almost) no business being automated, and spending far longer configuring, debugging, and refining your "time saving" scripts than actually doing the damn task are what I expect a dev to get lost in.

Which, sure, is a form of laziness, but it has a different vibe than getting an LLM to do everything for you IMO.

As an aside, a common refrain is that the best computer people are innately curious; they wanted to see how the computer responded if they broke or changed something. LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen; in a way, I'd argue they destroy curiousity itself: a horrifying proposition for anyone that looks to the future of computing, or even humanity in general.

[0] https://m.xkcd.com/1319/

[marcus_holmes]

> LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen

My experience has been the opposite. I get claude to go down those rabbit holes a lot, precisely because the effort of doing that is smaller, and claude usually has some insights that help. Often mistaken insights, but still.

[tasuki]

> If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me".

And the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points.

One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?

[marcus_holmes]

Or indeed, what essays are for, if the bullet points are communicating the same information

[godelski]

  > which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it

Literacy isn't just the ability to read words, it's the ability to interpret them.

You can read while still being illiterate

[ngriffiths]

Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.

[duped]

Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.

[awepofiwaop]

Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses.

If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.

[KevinMS]

> are the voters who will not be able to read a bill

politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large

[jhbadger]

Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.

[stult]

That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms.

Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.

[ludicrousdispla]

"comprising" and "consisting of" have very different meanings in patent law, but I expect most people would consider them synonymous.

[jhbadger]

I think you overestimate how much the average person can understand opaque jargon like "party of the first part". I'm sure good legal writing can avoid these things, but often (such as in the licenses people are theoretically supposed to click on that they have read and agree to for software), the opaqueness is the point -- they don't really want the user to understand what they are agreeing to.

[ipsento606]

> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it

A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.

[ngriffiths]

It is not written though

[beej71]

The author should have said "read a voter information pamphlet".

[jimbokun]

> nobody can read a bill

Especially not our politicians.

[JumpCrisscross]

> nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument

Really? I have no legal training. I can follow a SCOTUS opinion and most local legislation.

[thefz]

A literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.