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Comment by acheron | Hacker News Reader

You must be old. Nowadays even Harvard students aren't expected to be able to read anything complicated. From coincidentally, another New Yorker link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the... -- "The last time I taught 'The Scarlet Letter,' I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb," she said. "Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago."

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That is terrifying. If the elite of the elite can't interact with historical works, how can we trust them to make informed decisions about the present? I really don't want foreign policy on India set by Harvard grads who have never read Ghandi, and I don't want domestic policy set by people who haven't read the Scarlet Letter.

It’s Gandhi.

The nineteenth century, hell. I have to limit the grammatical complexity I use here, or expect to be fussed at by people asking for summarization.

Or, lately, pasting into ChatGPT, I suppose. There's a thought: I wonder if I could develop a style that's consistent with the rules of English grammar and reads naturally to the fluent, but is also too complex for LLMs to reliably summarize. It'd be a pure gimmick, of course, but it still might be fun to play around with...

Yes; alas, "fluent" is mu (nothingness). Barriers, barriers are. One may permit it in art, but communication thwarted brings pain. (This has absolutely nothing to do with a squirrel.)

Granted. But are we engineers or aren't we? If we won't develop the capacity to reckon with complex thoughts, then what can we even claim to offer over a coding model?

(You also suggest my use of "fluent" begs the wrong question. How so? Not every thought is trivial of expression, or we'd need no words but the commonest ten hundred.)

Say not the straightforward deeply, but the deep straightforwardly.

(NP-hard so.) Two words, answering directly yet explaining nothing. Shibboleths and CAPTCHAs are illusionary protection (and really exclusionary).

They're poor, early tools. But a complex world can be addressed as if only so simple. Or safely, anyway.

It's not that I don't understand the temptation otherwise. But those are sent to be mastered, I heard.

Science is not obscurantism. Of their purpose, these tools are early (we hope). Of their ilk, these tools are late, almost unsurpassable, and unenviable.

Ah. So that's why so many people think chatgpt is such a boon for drafting trivial things that a competent writer could do almost as fast, but with more control. They really can't do it.

The deskilling continues. "What can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years putting heads on pins?"

PS: I am not that old. I was in the college class '11 at an average small liberal arts college with an over 60% acceptance rate. I was not exceptional. I think the deskilling has accelerated very greatly and very recently.

The story by E.M. Forster is actually "The Machine Stops". The dystopia that came to mind for me was Harrison Bergeron, only instead of a human Handicapper General enforcing an equality of sub-mediocrity, it will be the masses and the tools they were bequeathed by the FAANGs. Having also been at uni in '11, I agree - GenZ and below are unnerving to observe.

NB- this is in reply to an earlier version of my comment, which I edited out purely for brevity, but now guiltily am restoring here-- where I worried we're marching towards a dystopia like the ones imagined in many works like Idiocracy, Wall-E, or The Machine Stops (misremembering the title as The Machine Breaks Down or something)

You make a very good point. I am starting to hear things along the lines of "But it's normal that some people learn better from videos" and "Why are you gatekeeping this knowledge" and even here you increasingly see references to videos that are much lower detail but higher time commitment summaries of writing that has much more detail available yet could be consumed, skimmed, etc more quickly than sitting through a video that your eyes have no ability to skip around, rushing past the irrelevant and dwelling on the relevant, without ever having to click a button.

They already invented telepathic interfaces -- books.

I was really confused when I posted my comment and didn't see any mention of the titles I saw in the original.

A succinct encapsulation of the problem is that the total "signal" of civilization is now being eclipsed exponentially, in all sorts of ways, by "noise". Some people say we're heading towards singularity, and others towards collapse; either way I'm confident we'll live to see some sort of great Reckoning, because I don't see how the generations after Millennial can sustain the current setup and weight of civilization.

Not just Gen Z. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade reading level[1][2][3]. The younger generations might skew the results, I haven't dug deep into the links.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-...

2: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s....

3: https://map.barbarabush.org

The mind fairly boggles. That's depressing.

That’s what happens when the political apparatus shortchanges public education for decades: illiteracy and innumeracy.

I wonder what impact it will have on America's ability to operate over the next few decades. Will a lack of intelligent communicators find themselves unable to coordinate complex business? Even the simplest of enterprises at scale are quite complex.

I expect the end game if it continues is something like Elysium where we're going to bifurcate into a small, literate, educated class, whose parents were able to send them to private schools or overseas to be educated, and who will run the show, and a large underclass who end up as fodder for the corporate machine and/or the war machine. Today, we're in a competitive race to make enough to ensure our great-great-great-grandchildren end up in the first group and not the second.

"Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison."

Scarlet Letter was important among the limited works that could afford to be published. It touches on important idea. But it's stilted language of a different society isn't better than modern language. Just as we don't consider Nathaniel Hawthorne stupid because he wouldn't easily understand a modern sentence like "An open source platform for building a writing space on the web."

Why do people like yourself have such an allergy to becoming familiar with the past? It is as small-minded to be parochially bound to your own time as it is to your own country. Think of it as analogous to learning Spanish or Chinese so you can understand people from those places.

Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same language, only a very, very, very slightly different dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a slightly different distribution of which are popular. Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find the rest easy.

When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are admitting you've never tried for very long.

Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker would understand it), as well as the fact that the average urbanite today does not know the names of many common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)

Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn from it and make good choices in the future.

That isn't stilted, nor is it some crazy difficult usage of past English. If someone really can't understand it, then they really are ignorant.

And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its subject matter, storytelling, and playful use of language.

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