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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

In 2023, 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, indicating significant difficulty with everyday reading tasks. https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...

You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there.

People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

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Yeah, it is an interesting bubble to be in. I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. I definitely felt the difference in education with the new hires. Reading comprehension/attention was weak. AI will easily replace them, I guess.

Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.

>I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE.

Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?

Oh, I WISH that was the case but I'd estimate only 10% of SWE would fit your model of minimum competence... and yeah a lot of that 10% are browsing HN. I recall in 2016 asking coworkers why they voted trump. "My 401k" was a frequent answer.

Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.

How do we fix this should be the question asked. Is it even possible at this point?

I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.

Education is a public good, therefore good education is socialist, and Americans are very hyper-individualist (aka antisocial). History suggests that Americans generally only move toward communal support systems during extreme crises, like the shift during the Great Depression. Even Covid wasn't enough to get people asking for universal healthcare, it has to be much worse.

Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.

I'd argue from the founding of the country all the way up to Nixon/Reagan the country took education seriously. It wasn't due to economic crisis as there were many since the founding. There was this sense of societal responsibility that has disappeared.

> People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42.

One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.

This math would work on any demographic.

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