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Comment by pseudo0 | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the original PIAAC data source (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/), it looks like the level one or below counties are pretty strongly correlated with proximity to the southern border... How many of those people were educated in the US system, or are eligible to vote?

Also, in the future maybe submit the primary data source, rather than a Wikipedia link that cites a Forbes article?

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This is the key observation: these surveys aim to determine the general English literacy of the American workforce. You don't have to be a US citizen or a voter, or even an English speaker to work in this country.

A more accurate metric would be "prose literacy in the individual's at-home spoken language," which would probably yield a significantly less drastic picture. Perhaps not the best one, but nowhere near as eye grabbing as "54% of Americans can't read beyond a middle school level."

English is the language of commerce and government. My fluency in Tagalog is great, but has minimal impact outside of a small community. Even if you speak a different language at home, school is primary taught in English with exceptions for Spanish or other languages in some regions.

My dad taught English at a community college a decade ago, mostly to soldiers returning from the war. They were mostly smart, motivated people determined to succeed and facing many obstacles. It was shocking to him that they were writing 5 page essays for the first time as 20-something college students.

I think we as a society just don't believe enough in the learning capacity of adults. I've recently taught my sister (24, ex-chef) all my highschool math (i was in a reinforced math class) plus analysis 101 in the span of two weekends. It was good enough that she now is in the better half or her college math class, full of 18 years old who just finished HS (and most of them with reinforced math options). My best friend learned spanish in less than three month at 27.

A corollary to this observation (adults, or a least young adults, can learn really fast, and even faster than adolescents) is that we need more formation options for adults. You should be able to leave school at 14, work a trade, then stop in your 20s to integrate college and learn something new. And college could be a more open place with ex-plumber, ex-cooks and ex-electricians in it. The best software engineer my age i worked with worked on HT lines for 3 years.

Still, it is interesting to look at questions that most people failed. Apparently in the 2003 round of evaluations only 16% of participants could answer the question "What is the purpose of the Se Habla Espanol expo?" after reading this short magazine article.

https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164

What percentage of people started reading that crap and quickly decided, I don't care?

I would question how many people "failed" to answer this question because of poor literacy versus a lack of domain knowledge in the subject matter. The article is full of sales and marketing jargon that most people -- in my experience -- just don't have experience with.

It has the same fundamental problem as standardized tests that frame questions around how many polo ponies Alistair and Theodora have at their summer stables. Some people are disadvantages by having just literally no idea what the passage is talking about.

I cannot even find one piece of jargon in that passage. Here is a list of marketing jargon [1]. Just because you are not exposed to a topic does not make any conversation about the topic contain jargon. If I say "baseball is a sport where you use a bat to hit a ball to score points", the word "bat" is not jargon because we only use that definition in the context of sports.

[1] - https://www.precisionmarketinggroup.com/blog/a-quick-glossar...

> I cannot even find one piece of jargon in that passage.

"the Hispanic market."

"brand conscious"

"brand loyal"

""It’s all contacts . . . contacts . . . contacts!""

"media play"

"sponsor visibility"

> Just because you are not exposed to a topic does not make any conversation about the topic contain jargon

That is true. It is also true that people who are familiar with a particular subject and vernacular tend to not recognize when they aren't explaining something clearly. (For the record, I've worked in sales, alongside marketing colleagues, for almost 20 years.)

> If I say "baseball is a sport where you use a bat to hit a ball to score points", the word "bat" is not jargon because we only use that definition in the context of sports.

At no point does the article contain anything like a clear description analogous to your example.

I love that the article I presume you got that from [1] states:

> Acceptable answers include statement such as:

> To enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community.

Which is not only grammatically incorrect, but grammatically incorrect to the point of message-shattering ambiguity. Is the triplet of statements required for an acceptable answer, or would any individual statement from that list suffice? If all three would be required I doubt I'd have been marked correct - I would have just listed the most important one then moved on to the next question.

[1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-rea... (first search result for "Se Habla Español Hits Chicago" besides the link you gave)

Any individual statement from the list will suffice. This is already clear in the Overcoming Bias post, but it's equally clear in the source, which says this:

> Correct Answer:

> Any statement such as the following: to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community

It is technically true that "Acceptable answers include statement such as:" is grammatically incorrect, but the error is so obvious that it would normally be called a "typo" and not a "grammatical error".

What "source" is this? I found https://nces.ed.gov/Pubs2007/2007480_3.pdf, which is considerably more clear as it lists the three statements as entirely separate list items:

> Any statement such as the following:

> To enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community

> To improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community

> To enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community

I truly disbelieve you can claim in good faith that that is "equally clear" as:

> Acceptable answers include statement such as:

I think interpreting the semi-colon'd sentence as a single "statement", especially given the ambiguity introduced by their grammatical error, is entirely reasonable. I was genuinely unsure as to the correct interpretation. Who's to say that the correct edit is adding an `s` to the end of `statement` versus adding an `a ` to its beginning?

The source is the same one linked in the post you're trying to slam. The URL has changed from http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_question.asp , as written in the post, to https://nces.ed.gov/naal/sample_items.asp . You can easily find the question by using the Text String Search field.

> I was genuinely unsure as to the correct interpretation. Who's to say

You're arguing at the level of this handless guy now. https://xkcd.com/169/

You seem to be confusing your argument for my own. I'm the one claiming that the text is ambiguous and shouldn't be, you seem to be outright denying that it's ambiguous at all? You're the handless guy feeling smug about their innate knowledge that the author's intention was "Acceptable answers include statements such as:" rather than "Acceptable answers include a statement such as:", I'm the top-hat dude calling you out.

You are the handless guy protesting that you're technically correct despite being forced to use interpretations that nobody else would ever consider. Try asking people how to read that post. See how many of them misunderstand it or think it's confusing.

> I'm the one claiming that the text is ambiguous

Between the handless guy and the top-hat dude, which one is claiming the text is ambiguous? How well-grounded is that claim?

That wouldn't explain the pattern in the South, which is basically exactly the distribution of former slave areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_Sou...

Socioeconomic status probably best explains that one, and is probably at least a component everywhere else.

In any case, the geographic visualization on that page suffers from the same problem as electoral maps, where areas with very low populations (e.g the Texas border) occupy lots of visual space. The problem is really much worse in the South due to higher populations.

That website has one of the better data exploration interfaces I’ve seen on a .gov site.

In the USA in virtually all cases where a study says some population metric is changing the actual correct interpretation is that it’s the population itself that’s changing. If you control for that the trends look very different.

The original source has been submitted multiple times previously, three of them by myself, for what it's worth.

The HN submission queue is an arbitrary place. And clickbait is popular beause it works. (I strive strongly against it myself.)

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