… Fission power works.

It generates energy.

This is objectively true.

That is not nothing.

If you were being hyperbolic, well then your analogy is not analagous because one end of it is hyperbolic.

Oh there’s a lot more than just something.

Ya’ll want weirdo creepy shit?

My Dad made a thing of taking me, a 12 year old boy back in the early 00s, to Hooters, for a while, and would encourage me to oogle the servers.

This is… previously, before this, I was raised extremely prudish and right wing nutjob style Christian.

My Dad just snapped, internally, at some point… alcoholism followed this.

… my parents are still married, for some reason, even though they have clearly hated each other for a very long time.

I’d classify that as more of a Hell Mouth than a Glory Hole.

Not it isn’t.

Arguing that fission power won’t do anything is objectively incorrect.

Arguing that a general strike would be more effective than weekend rallies alone is objectively correct.

Your analogy is not analagous.

Beyond that, arguing against doing something is not the same as arguing for doing something else, in addition to /or/ instead of the original something.

No worries, I get what you’re saying! (I think)

Yes, language changes over time.

Yes, some terms are basically just shot in the pan, fairly short lived fads… but, sometimes they stick around enough to distinctively form part of a kind of age bracket / location specific dialect, or even spread more broadly.

‘Cool’ ‘Radical’ ‘Tubular’ ‘Groovy’… those are all older terms that were popularized by older age brackets, you can take a while bunch of millenialspeak/redditisms as examples as well, ‘smolbean’ ‘chonker’ ‘adulting’, etc.

But also yes, often, terms get reappropriated or basicslly misappropriated, kind of transmuted into having a just totally different meaning, which can then create a lot of confusion when some people are using a more original, domain specific meaning, and then there is a kind of nebulous, vague, commonplace usage of the term.

‘Therapyspeak’ as proliferated by Tiktok is a great example of the dangers and problems of that.

Tons of people misuing terms that have actual specific meanings, that they then almost always use to essentially weaponize their own narcissism.

There are tons of other more technical terms that have more specific meanings in some field of study, but then also have a vague or different colloquial meaning, and then people will just conflate the two different usage/meanings…

That’s pretty much the basis of a bunch of woowoo, psuedo-intellectual, spiritual guru type nonsense, its also used by cults and con artists.

‘Energy’ in physics is not the same thing as ‘energy’ used to describe basically someone’s demeanor, their current mood.

But, in another comment, up the chain in this thread, I did try to lay out how ‘cats are autistic’ is actually a reasonably accurate and defensible use of the term.

I think that if people are more commonly using complex terms… actually relatively correctly… that is just a good thing.

It normalizes the idea that yeah, autistic people exist, they are different, and thats ok, and its also ok to talk about how they are different, because maybe we can all understsnd and relate to them better by way of decently accurate analogies.

What would worry me is people using the term very incorrectly, accidentally or purposefully promoting false stereotypes, or just purely using ‘autistic’ as an insult.

So, I wanted to try and point out some of the details, have the conversation.

Essentially, I’m arguing that language does broadly change over time, and also, broader acceptance and discussion of how neurodivergence actually works is a good thing.

Is me doing that ‘forced’, not a ‘natural’ evolution of language? Eh, sure.

But if a whole bunch of people are also just… using the term autistic more frequently… well, I’m not in charge of all of them, but maybe I can try to at least… shape the flow of that river, so to speak, so that more people know more about the word they’re now using more often.

… quoth the raven, “please, some more.”

Unfortunately, I’m not super into the whole… total owner/master/dom thing.

I am just enough of a switch to be somewhere between flirty and tease.

I need that reciprocating energy, that matches, and then undermatches, and then overmatches, etc.

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.

"How badly do I need to poop? "

A novel application of Binary Space Partitioning

Authors: Harry S. Stool, Floe O. Welles, Lavat T. Rushdie

…

I am not able to discern a semantic structure here.

… Perhaps the meaning is… conveyed through… tonality? Pitch? … ?

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.

Wow, what a whiff.

No, your response there is something like:

“Oh dear, you’d better pull that fineapple plug out rather slowly… got a lot of ridges, kinda sharp, no need for unnecessary suffering on the way out.”

That’s at least an attempt at recovery, instead of a total capitulation.

Depends.

Do ‘bottom noises’ have a discernible semantic structure?

I gonna need more details.

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.

… A prominent cultural meme that is widely adopted… literally is a natural evolution of language.

This is the extremely common and normal method by which languages change over time, which, with the exception of conlangs, they all do.

Go back to 1950 and tell an American English speaker that a song ‘is fire’. Tell them that Elvis is just aura farming. Tell them that their fit is lacking.

They will be confused.

Take an American English speaker from 1950 to the present, and they tell you somebody made a boner at the lollapalooza they were last at.

You probably will not understand that to mean that somebody made a moderately significant mistake at a raccous party, like spilling their drink on the host, or bringing the wrong side dish.

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.

… well now you’re just yanking my chain.

=P

Just continue the metaphor, though maybe… backwards.

Get the ‘health bar’ down to zero.

Now you get a ‘boss stage transition’.

Now get the ‘health bar’ to zero again.

… repeat untill you are either dead or out of stamina.

Use a DMC/Bayonetta style additional scoring system for ‘style’ and ‘combos’, ‘damage’ done in a short period of time, sustained ‘damage’ output, etc.

… You follow?

You, as the ‘tutorial boss’, the goal is to ‘defeat’ you as many times as possible, with the highest score possible.

The game isn’t won when you uh… roll over, thats when the game begins.

You don’t just win, you go for SSS rank.

EDIT:

What is the French term for an orgasm, the ecstasy/dissociation afterward?

La petit mort, the little death.

… kill 'em with kindness, eh?

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.