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I think there should be documentaries about fictional worlds. Can you honestly say that you don’t want a history channel style documentary about how the axis powers won ww2 which created the world seen in The Man in the High Castle?
Go Read house of Leaves
I mean, personally, I think the greatest stumbling block to media illiteracy, is just literal, functional illiteracy.
Median adult American reads at a 5th grade level.
Normally I’d also say ‘Look at the Flesch Kinkaid level of Presidential speeches overtime’, but at this point, a person would need an LLM to explain Flesch Kinkaid reading level to them, and … well I don’t even know if most of the things Trump have said in the last year or two… are even actually comprehensible.
Sure, I can answer that for you! ☺️ Here is the answer to your question—“What is Flesch Kinkaid?”
Flesch Kinkaid was an American painter of popular realistic, pastoral, and idyllic subjects. He is notable for achieving success during his lifetime with the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products by means of the Flesch Kinkaid Company. According to Kinkaid’s company, at one point one in every 20 American homes owned a copy of one of his paintings. 🫨
Wow—That sure is a lot of paintings! 🖼️ Would you like me to look into how many paintings the average American home contains? 🇺🇲
/uj on a more serious note, yeah I had to look up what Flesch Kinkaid is (without AI, the old fashioned way), but i dont feel like small gaps in knowledge like that should be the bar for people with literacy skills. Literacy is more about being able to read and understand natural language. Knowing about that specific test is not a sign of literacy.
While your LLM slop is on point, you’ve ironically illustrated my actual point.
My last paragraph is an example.
It’s a pithy quip.
It is not the crux of the operative argument.
But you focused on specific knowledge of the Flesch Kinkaid reading level metric… as a primary thrust of the argument.
No, the argument is in the first sentence.
Also… having a full, broad and deep understanding of the concepts at play, being mentioned and referenced in an article, by a book, in a movie script, etc…
That actually is a part of being rated as high reading level by the Flesch Kinkaid metric.
Essentially, its breadth of vocabulary.
If your vocabulary lacks less commonly used, but specific concepts, relevant to the point being made… people will tend to either pretend they aren’t present in the text, or, just make up an intuited meaning, which may or may not be accurate, or, as you have done, will actually take the time to try and learn what they mean.
But, because you cognitively spent so much time/energy on expanding your vocabulary, you interpreted or reinterpreted the totality of what I said to be focused on knowledge of Flesch Kinkaid.
Again, no, that isn’t the crux of the argument.
But, in doing this, you have ironically demonstrated why a pre-existing functional understanding of the concepts at play is an important component of more advanced literacy.
A term I used basically flippantly, because I am so familiar with it that I find it mundane… to you, that is a new term, so your brain focused more on comprehending the new term, over interpreting the entirety of what I actually said.
If you don’t understand the more uncommon or advanced concepts that a piece of media is using, referencing, prior to engaging with it… you won’t understand a joke based off of that more advanced concept.
Thus, if a character in a show/movie does that… or an op-ed in a news article does that… or a youtuber in a video essay does that… you are more likely to misinterpret the media.
Why are they booing you, you’re right?
Turret’s “serious” comment said that you claimed people should know about/have awareness of that Flesch-Kincaid reading level as a determinant of literacy…but you never said that.
I will admit I had to go back and actually read both comments because I tend to tune out long comments (many long comments are slavering diatribes not fit to store in any memory, long-term nor short). Maybe that’s what’s happened here.
Because they’re being somewhat derisive and structured their sentences to be less comprehensible
“…you have ironically demonstrated that a pre-existing functional understanding of the concepts at play is an important component of more advanced literacy.”
Translation: being familiar with more words/concepts gives you the ability to understand what was said on a deeper level.
This actually took more effort to write than the esoteric one, because I put in effort to make sure I’m not being esoteric for the sake of it. I’m not against using more vocab or higher level sentence structure, but the sentence I quoted is a perfect example of being verbose for no gain in understanding or richness in the sentence.
The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.
It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.
Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.
This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts… books, basically.
But… our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point… maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.
This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a ‘wall of text’, because they assume it is… some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.
But long form writing… was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.
Postage, mail, letters… would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call ‘essays’… just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.
Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.
We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.
Why are they booing me?
They aren’t very literate, they mainly understand ‘literate’ to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I’ve insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.
They’re more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean…
…they’re more concerned with labelling ‘good’ people with ‘good’ labels, and ‘bad’ people with ‘bad’ labels…
Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.
Comparing not knowing a niche concept to functional illiteracy and then berating someone for playfully pointing out that the concept is niche isn’t the clever gotcha you think it is, it just comes across as snobbish or elitist.
You wanted the conversation to go exactly where you wanted it to go. You didn’t write an essay the next guy missed the point of, you made a comment, and they made a comment in an informal online forum space. Just seems like you made a “joke” and then they made a joke focused on the part of the discussion they’re interested in, but because it’s not the exact response you were looking for (which I’m guessing was simply affirmation), you assume they missed your point.
I looked up the test and I get top category because I can read and understand academic papers but I’d fail that guys test since I’d never heard of it.
Comparing not knowing a niche concept to functional illiteracy
Again, this isn’t the primary argument I made.
One can make an argument, a logical construction, and then provide an example.
The example is not the argument.
It exemplifies the argument.
Being able to identify what parts of a text serve what purpose… is a part of the skillset of more advanced literacy.
it just comes across as snobbish or elitist.
A person with a broader vocabulary definitionally has a superior level of literacy, as compared to a person who has a smaller vocabulary, all else held equal.
This just literally is part of how literacy is measured.
A person with superior literacy does have an elite level of comprehension, compared to someone with an inferior level of literacy.
You cannot construct a comparative scale of levels of literacy without scores that are higher and lowers than others, sets of concepts they do and do not understand, and can or cannot make use of.
A person who can evaluate integrals in calculus has a superior, elite level of mathematical comprehension, as compared to someone who can only do algebra.
If you have no metric, no measurement, no way to compare levels of ability in a subject… you cannot objectively compare them.
You wanted the conversation to go exactly where you wanted it to go.
You’re now presuming to read my inner thoughts, read my mind.
No, I did not.
You are thinking I devised this all as a trap, that I was waiting to spring.
In reality, I woke up, read a reply to a thing I wrote before I fell asleep, and viewed it as an opporunity to further educate people on what literacy is, how this works.
But you have intuited hostile intent from this, probably because you don’t like the idea of me explaining to someone that they are not as literate as they think they are, or that its simply insulting to point this out.
To the contrary, understanding what literacy actually is, how it works, how it can be and is measured…
These are fundamental things to grasp if you or anyone is serious about improving their own literacy, or the general literacy of the populace.
This is especially important when a literate public is vital to a functioning democratic society.
You have to understand the nuances, the complexities.
But, if you instead want to attack those you dissgree with, because you do not comprehend what they are saying…
If you want to assume everything is some kind of intentional, personal attack…
Don’t expect society or your understanding of it to get any better, any time soon.
Being able to identify what parts of a text serve what purpose… is a part of the skillset of more advanced literacy.
A person with a broader vocabulary definitionally has a superior level of literacy
You’re digging in your heels on something you’re fundamentally wrong about. You’re still talking about the nuts and bolts of syntax and grammar and vocabulary, which is an element of literacy but a dimension that isn’t particular all that important past a “good enough” threshold, at which point other dimensions start to predominate in terms of the broader look at what constitutes advanced literacy.
Being able to identify text is just a stepping stone towards being able to identify author intent, subtext, humor, artistic value, references and homages, metaphors, etc.
So what you’re talking about is important for literacy, but it’s still pretty far down the ladder of what many people would consider “advanced” literacy, and kinda a demonstration of the opposite of what you intend to convey: the fake LLM comment was making a joke, and you showed that you lack the more advanced literacy of being able to evaluate the text and the context for the underlying subtext, which was to be funny. Your decision to engage with it at face value entirely misses the point, and is itself a demonstration of failing a test of higher level literacy.
No, I acknowledged and understood the joke.
Literally the first thing I said.
The vast majority of my comment was an explanation of the false premise that was misread into what I said, in the text following the LLM joke.
That so many people cannot follow or interpret … what I actually said… demonstrates that, in some cases, a more advanced level of literacy is indeed required.
Haha holy shit, take your blood pressure meds and sit down.
or when people analyze fictional characters as if they were real people and not storytelling devices…
I recently watched another life, and if I were to judge those people as though they were people I could be friends with, I’d hate all of them and probably try to dump them out an airlock. Their reactions are wildly over the top and just unrealistic.
But as a show, I really enjoyed the constant soap-opera-style ramping up of stakes and events. It was just nonstop poor decisions resulting in drama.
It got canceled after the second season so I’m guessing I was in the minority about enjoying the presentation…
This one can be a very useful bit of media analysis, but yeah it’s not great that it’s becoming the default.
Maybe they’re just fucking stupid
“it has something silly or unrealistic therefore internal consistency and logic aren’t required”
