. these people are just as rational as anyone else
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.