Only 2% of US adults have high literacy | Hacker News Reader

Only 2% of US adults have high literacy

wyliecomm.com

Reading comprehension is highly "g-loaded", as psychometricians would say. In other words, it depends heavily on IQ. Arthur Jensen (noted IQ researcher) wrote this https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-g-factor... :

"After innumerable factor analyses had clearly established what types of test items are most g loaded, test constructors deliberately composed and selected items so as to maximize the g-ness of their IQ tests. The most g-loaded items are those that involve some form of inductive or deductive reasoning (i.e., Spearman’s “eduction of relations and correlates”), problems that involve spatial visualization, quantitative reasoning, and verbal knowledge and reasoning (such as word meanings, distinctions between related words, antonyms-synonyms, verbal analogies, and reading comprehension)."

In the linked article, look at what level 5 requires:

"Integrate information across multiple dense texts; construct syntheses, ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence-based arguments."

> "Integrate information across multiple dense texts; construct syntheses, ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence-based arguments."

I’m fluent in English (though as an American so British folk may disagree ;)). I wonder if I would meet the requirements for level 5. And I say that as someone who has published a couple of (very minor) articles in my technical field. Maybe I’m interpreting these requirements too harshly but this effectively sounds like what one does when one writes technical material for publication — and certainly above the level of sophistication of many op/ed pieces by widely syndicated authors.

I think this is pretty difficult and I’m not sure I could demonstrate this on a short-term test!

The report itself is linked as a reference within the article and I’m planning on taking a look when I have some time.

Being British I can assure you there is no Académie Française for English, so you can't ever be wrong!

However I was surprised on the chart by country to see "England and Northern Ireland - United Kingdom". I have heard of no celebrations in Scotland and Wales.

That's what the minimum bar of excellence should be, and it's the same standard for everyone.

Americans are more illiterate overall and have a level 5 rate comparable to the global average (which is low compared to top-performing countries). America's literacy problem has nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with poor education stemming from anti-intellectualism.

Can this infer anything about general education? I would think that language proficiency would heavily influence the result and skew the average, but that doesn't mean that people lack education in general. This asks for literacy specifically of course, just curious because I couldn't really imagine much about the questions that were asked to participants.

See the stacked bar graph at the bottom of the article. The US is near the bottom and Japan is at the top. I doubt the average American or Japanese person is any more or less intelligent.

I was shocked when I saw this figure. I assumed it was 8-15% at a lower limit. What this implies is that you can have a substantive intellectual conversation with only roughly 1 in 50 Americans.

Update: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. - George Carlin

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