Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8

A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:

> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.

The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:

> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.

28% of US adults are just at or below that level.

in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.

the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)

it also has 10y ago/now comparison.

a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"

thanks for pointing to the study!!

[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)

That's a really good catch. It looks like that 28% figure is specifically Level 1 or below in English literacy, which makes that number a whole lot less interesting for evaluating education levels.

I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.

Do you care about trends? Like an increase from 19% to 28% between 2017 and 2023?

Sure, but if that trend turns out to be an increase in non-English speakers it tells us less about the state of literacy, which is the thing I'm interested in here.

The national results page literally has a section where it shows separate results for native-born and non-native born participants. You claim that you're interested, so it's strange to see you speculate about what "turns out" when the answer is so conveniently available.

>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.

Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.

People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.

Nobody is blaming AI. The point is we don’t have the luxury of throwing nonsense at our kids when they’re illiterate. Particularly not nonsense where all the evidence shows it harms on average more than it helps.

Just wanna start off by saying that with young unformed minds, it does probably harm more on average than it helps. But particularly for spelling and reading, it might maybe actually help?

To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?

No, you can talk to them, and have them talk back. And it's really easy. You don't need to be good at reading or writing to use it.

You mean you can place transcript/dictation in front of them, so you don't have to type your words but you can speak them, and the LLM will receive text? If so I'd still argue it's important to be able to read and write to be able to use them effectively, but I have to also be honest, I never met/seen anyone who couldn't read/write and was using an LLM, I might be very wrong here.

AI hasn't had a chance to demonstrate if it helps or hurts education yet.

That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.

This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!

That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.

No?

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

This also links back up to the Ironies of Automation, which came out decades ago.

The reports from teachers for the past few years have been pretty stark, with kids completely obviating homework.

Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.

>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.

In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.

> Even if the Finns don't need it, research suggests it makes a positive difference. Prof Susan Hallam from the Institute of Education says there is "hard evidence" that homework really does improve how well pupils achieve. "There is no question about that," she says. A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005

Finns appear to have a school system that works in a manner that suits their nation, and was reformed decades ago.

>A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework

It didn't control for why they were doing the homework. I'd bet if you did a study comparing two cohorts of students with identical social-economic status and IQ, you wouldn't see a significant difference.

That's not true, it absolutely depends on effect size. I'll give you an obvious example: large lead acetate infusions. You'll notice pretty fast.

OK so you can consider it was noticed.

Right, AI isn't to blame for that, but cell phones might be? The bad number increased from 19 to 28 percent between 2017 and 2023.

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