Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

> PIAAC defines literacy as “the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential” (p. 61, OECD 2013).

I often observe a variation of literacy which doesn’t seem to get much discussion:- people who are notionally literate and can pass literacy tests, but for whom the objective of reading is not to actually read the words, but to “get the gist” of a paragraph. This might include skimming techniques. It has a relatively high payoff as a reading strategy, because often the gist is all you strictly need.

But when faced with a text where the precise meaning of words and their order actually matters, these people struggle a lot.

My observations are in the context of supporting non-technical people interpret semi-technical material, so there’s a confounding factor of the text discussing a relatively tricky subject matter. But I’ve seen this pattern enough, and drilled down to the resolution often enough, that I am convinced that the core issue is one of literacy and reading skill, not mastery of the subject matter. To use a technical analogy, it feels like the texts are using Real numbers but these people are only reading the nearest Integer.

I have no data but can’t help feel this is somehow related to the death of nuance in discourse.

You've put in words something that has been around my mind for so much time. Thanks for sharing the thought! I would say some of my problems are related to what you just wrote.

I've been an avid reader all my life, mostly of fiction novels, but not only.

Over time, as the habits of my work have permeated into my daily life I've found the following:

- I skim over most written text to get to gist of it, even for novels

- as a consequence, I usually lose the nuance and the details of a text, even though I get mostly 80% of the content. I find myself needing to go back when I don't understand why something happens, or a character comes out of nowhere, etc.

The same thing has also filtered to my non-reading habits, for example when listening to people. I quickly switch to getting the gist of what someone is telling me and making up the rest in my mind.

And this has gotten me into trouble several times, even though it is an effective technique most of the time when programming or with similarly related tasks and you research across many tabs and search results and you need to get knowledge quickly without stopping to read everything.

I've tried to slow down myself and really listen until the end when people talk to me, and making a conscious effort to try to remember what they're saying to me, or what I'm reading. This works better.

I also feel that having access to all those helps, reminders, and also search engines, has greatly deteriorated my memory capacity or willingness to store facts, plans, ideas, in my mind, as I know I can retrieve it later if I need it, or I trust tools to remind me of things. I've become more forgetful over time.

Well...at least it is important to be aware to try to fix it.

I'm not from the US, I think it is a global phenomenon for similar cultures.

Instead of skimming, I just won't read something as I don't believe skimming imparts any actual knowledge. Your comment for instance. I read the first few sentences and skipped the rest.

You are, essentially, describing reading comprehension which is tested in literacy tests. The easier ones can be skimmed, that is the point, someone can skim grade 4 level material and get the gist of it. However, through some university level content at them and they may fail miserably. The people you reference may pass the easier tests and they should, but of course they will fail at the higher level ones because they didn't read/comprehend them well.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.7129...

In the grand view of things, you really want folks to have the ability to get the precise meaning of the words. It is the difference between "take this medicine every few hours" and "Take 4 times a day, at least x hours apart". You'll get to the first thing by following the second, but might not follow the second by doing the first. In other words, approximates are great until they aren't.

Skimming is a skill that can be taught as well - in fact, I remember learning different skimming techniques in school. It isn't as useful without being able to parse out exacts when needed, though.

Key points you make here.

I have to wonder how much of it is due to just lazy habits, e.g., when major newspapers are written to a 6th-grade reading level, it's pretty easy to slide into skimming habits.

OTOH, once the texts get seriously detailed, even when well-written, logic ability and skills come to the fore - if you cannot simultaneously hold in your head each the multiple concepts being described, as well as the logical relations being described, you'll have a really hard time understanding the interactions between those concepts.

Research to sort out the difference would be really interesting to see. If it is a lot of just bad skimming habits, seems easy to cure. But fundamental limitations in logical abilities and skills are much harder to address.

I'm personally in favor of keeping news at a somewhat low reading level.

Yes, I want folks to be literate, but I also want news to be available to as many people as possible. Having local news at a lower reading level means that younger people can understand the news. Immigrants and others that are learning the language of the area truly benefit. Easy to read news is more easily understood when folks don't have as much mental stamina, too.

Besides, advertisements surely are going to keep to simply language so that more folks understand them. So will various other players. Might as well be sure to give factual things too.

Agree, even if it is predominantly lazy get-the-gist reading habits that makes the difference, I don't think the solution would be to crank up the reading level of everything (and you laid out here a great set of reasons!).

Those of us that want more complex material can find it.

This is interesting, but I doubt this part

> I have no data but can’t help feel this is somehow related to the death of nuance in discourse.

It was a largely illiterate society that originally enjoyed the works of Homer and Shakespeare, for instance.

ETA It may be that our society now more sorts into literate and illiterate groups and these groups behave differently, interact differently. In ancient times the same groups existed, perhaps, but couldn't be sorted by literacy.

>It was a largely illiterate society that originally enjoyed the works of Homer and Shakespeare, for instance.

Were the works of Homer and Shakespeare enjoyed by a significant chunk of the population, or only by the elites at the time?

>But when faced with a text where the precise meaning of words and their order actually matters, these people struggle a lot.

Why is that? Is it because they try to speedrun through the test, causing them to miss the important details and doing horribly on the comprehension questions? Or are they not able to decipher the "the precise meaning of words and their order" regardless of time?

I used to be someone that really put pressure on myself to focus and understand what it is a piece's author was trying to convey.

Now I've stopped caring so much, after reading beyond plenty of material from all over the spectrum (including the PIAAC's "Level 5," where the only difference between it and lower levels is that "Level 5" stuff is mostly the authors flexing their mastery over extraneous vocabulary, at the cost of "getting to the point," and succinctly presenting the "meaty core" of whatever it is they're trying to get across).

Long words and sentences do not make for better writing. Sometimes they are warranted, but many times I simply skim over them, because it's clear what the author is trying to say, but he still wishes to self-fellate on how "nuanced" his views are (see: most geopolitical works).

I have yet to come across a work where painstaking precision is warranted. That's not to say precision is unwarranted, but simply that the author hasn't taken any time to distill only the most important parts, and formulate a sufficiently brisk sentence to encapsulate the core of his thoughts (and let the reader's intuition fill in the gaps).

Too much liberty is taken in rambling down winding paths, only to come back the other way, and leave me thinking: "what was the fucking point?"

Most long works written today can be distilled into a pamphlet. And almost anyone who thinks his views are sufficiently nuanced, that they require long and tedious expositions is simply deluding themselves of their own self-importance (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, is an apt example).

Ideas are overrated. If they're self-evident enough that the intuition readily grasps hold of it, it doesn't need 300 pages to convince itself so. It's as if all that cruft is there only to distract you of how shallow the ideas are, and to trick you into thinking "wow, this is long and I'm having a difficult time really wrapping my head around it... surely this knowledge must be so advanced that it's worth the effort!"

Even our classical thinkers suffer from this. Clauswitz's On War could be summarized into a single page; the rest is simply Clauswitz overestimating how much his ideas matter.

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