> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein.
Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices.
I'm not an MBA guy, so I can't speak to the curriculum in Biz Schools, but I can say that what you say does come across with most MBAs I have met. In that they think similarly about their education being about the networking and not really about the material.
Which is a shame really for both of our sides of this all.
I think you are saying that the publishers are essentially paying for minimum words / word count. Which is the opposite of what any writing upperdivision teacher would tell you about writing. And I'm saying that you are getting busy work assigned from the professor in the first place (and then saying that i haven't experienced that).
The solution is to have the students take charge of their education and be less passive. If the assignments are bad (in selection or in writing) then the student should challenge the teacher on it.
Yeah, that's a harder way to do things, yes, but I think anyone out of school for anytime will agree that it would be a better way.
Thank you for sharing you experience with me all the same.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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!
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't know. I used to feel this way about IDE autocompletes/suggestions. Now they are widely used, and it doesn't necessarily seem hostile. It's not that hard to imagine the same thing could happen here.
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.
In addition to covering the IPO in general last week, Matt Levine also wrote about this specific question Tuesday[1]:
> Historically index providers were in the business of making these sorts of quality decisions, so that index funds were not forced to buy stocks they didn’t like.
> These rules create some tension between the idea that an index is a list of all the stocks and the idea that an index is a list of all the good stocks. Historically, it didn’t matter all that much: The point of the stock market is to tell you which stocks are good, so a company with a high stock valuation should be a very good company, so it should get a high weighting in both the Index of Good Companies and the Index of All the Companies.
> But SpaceX — and also maybe OpenAI and Anthropic in their coming IPOs — will probably break that link. SpaceX will probably (1) do all sorts of stuff that index funds hate and that index providers have specifically tried to exclude and also (2) be gigantic, because the market loves it.
The original decision is interesting because at first it seems very stupid (as acknowledged right there in the article). It's a more expensive way to do the same thing. But man, what a sales pitch, not only for their own customers but also to employees. The feeling is that the company values its people and is willing to really depend on them, and look, it actually paid off when they did that.
I think it's common to claim to care about the people without really depending on them for much (like with perks) or to depend on the work but treat people badly, and doing both is hard.
Yeah, I mean it's obviously meant to be a marketing pitch but it's not a very good one.
> The hardest computational problems are not waiting for faster chips – they are waiting for machines that compute in a fundamentally different way.
Surely they don't actually believe that, right? Like you say the benefits must be limited to specific shapes of problems (not all of "the hardest" ones), and the whole history of computing is about how faster chips is an excellent answer to difficult computational problems.
> and the whole history of computing is about how faster chips is an excellent answer to difficult computational problems.
I don't really disagree, and I am definitely not taking their marketing pitch seriously. Yet, you could look at the same computation history and interpret it as an economically constrained hill-climbing around an idea that was simple enough to work reliably (von Neumann architecture) and that worked and scaled so well that we were rarely forced or desperate enough to move conceptually far away from it.
Sufficiently general digital computers can simulate other computational models, so I think 'faster' is ultimately the end game, but for some classes of computation, as you also noted, we may need to go for analog hardware, (maybe) quantum devices, optical interconnects, and so on.
Bret Victor has a talk about this, more or less: [0]
That's interesting, thanks. I only read the abstract so far but was immediately reminded of this recent HN submission[1] and the whole thing that certain ideas go together, and so they are adopted together, but the resulting bundle of ideas might be poorly suited to certain problems.
Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide" the numbers a bit behind a blaring headline that says "we are not sure!!" It's a bit of an art to decide when to be "sure" or not. On the other hand, in research for example you can just say screw it, I care if the correct people are correct, not if a bunch of wrong people are wrong.
I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.
The real caveat is that 538 was a Monte Carlo model, and is only as good as its inputs. "Here's what the current spread in polling numbers is *given our model and the current polling and their reported uncertainties.*" Polling uncertainties are themselves computed under certain models, and those models are subject to errors. I don't think 538 hid this, but it's a difficult caveat for people to reason about because the sorts of modeling errors that have the most influence usually represent "unknown unknowns".
Building a model for predicting the ultimate winner of a US presidential election is particularly difficult, because you are dealing with noisy input data and nonlinear effects, i.e. just a few thousand votes in a few key states can completely flip the outcome. If you then have poorly calibrated polls with a large margin of error, there is really nothing much you can do.
On the other hand, it does raise the question how valuable the 538 models for something like this really are if the outcome is a coin flip anyway.
Exactly, and correlated errors, where a polling error in one state predicts similar errors across the board.
I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that inform strategy where appropriate. Since the president is a big deal other people's decisions are also impacted, and in the long run it pays to have good predictions of those chances. Also, the outcome sometimes is fairly certain and that isn't always easy to see.
I agree, it's far from pointless. The 538 model is arguably close to the best you can do considering how difficult the task is, but it's important to understand it as purely a reflection of the polling data (and 538's reliability scores for polls), and that polling data is inherently flawed. After all, there are only 2 ways to perform a perfectly accurate poll: either know the outcome a priori, or run the election. We shouldn't be too surprised when models like 538 fail to correctly predict the outcome, because that's not what they represent. It's an analytical tool for understanding the current state of polling.
> Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens.
I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)
People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").
Seems weird that it would piss you off, if you were really that invested in the cold hard stats you'd know that if it was fair rng you could still have been the 1 in 100,000 player that got lucky on 75% 40 times in a row.
Fire Emblem does something complex with averaging random numbers to do the same thing - a 95% chance to hit becomes 99.5, and the reverse for low percentages.
The thing jumping out at me is these really are mini businesses (even though they are bad). Combine it with the main idea in "Emacsification of Software" (from recent HN front page [1]) and I guess you end up with lots of nerds running their own customized mini businesses?
It's sorta wild to think about. Am I the owner of the custom radio station my AI agent made, and does that mean I get paid for listening to the ads?
Maybe the cost of computing and running the station means it still needs a decent following to break even, not sure how the numbers work out.
I think there are many ways someone with his lack of expertise can still be valuable, including:
- Making connections to other subjects that an expert would miss. The hall of fame of sigmoid predictions is just excellent, I already know I'm going to be reminded of it some time in the future. Very entertaining way to get the point across.
- Writing about tricky concepts in a very accessible and elegant way, which experts are notoriously bad at doing themselves - they are often optimizing for other specialists.
- Being able to write with an air of speculation and experimentation with ideas that experts and institutions often can't afford. Experts have to maintain their track record; Scott Alexander can say "lol just double the timeline"
you do you, I don't come here for superficially informed-looking articles written by people who are in fact not experts, informed or educated, I come here for the real deal
it doesn't help that sCotT aLexAndEr is also as close as you can come to the modern dressed up version of a eugenicist (again, not based on any actual expertise)
> as close as you can come to the modern dressed up version of a eugenicist
Their writing about genetic determinism is a turnoff to me too. But this essay is about a different topic, and a piece of writing by a writer who is known for writing substantively about a variety of topics should be evaluated on its own terms.
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.
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