Blogofex Maximus

this is a 100% factual statement! that is exactly what the disparate impact standard did and why it was so insane. "your business does not have enough black people, therefore, your business is unlawfully discriminating against black people" is a statement that requires you to either believe black people aren't more likely to live in poverty and aren't being failed by the school system, or to believe that neither of those things affect outcomes. it was part of the double bind where it was illegal to discriminate based on race and also illegal to not discriminate based on race. the famous FAA ATC scandal from a few years back was driven by this standard: black people just were not applying to be air traffic controllers, this meant the FAA was racist, they deliberately stopped accepting white and asian applicants almost entirely and gave the answers to the "biographic" test to black people ahead of time so that they could attain the correct racial makeup.

friend: send pics of your cat

me: oh that's clever. making sure i'm me and not a hacker sending you a virus. a picture of my cat is something a hacker would be hard pressed to fake, so you know it's actually me

I think sociology and psychology largely belong in a conflict theory rather than a mistake theory context: people who want to tell a particular narrative construct some unrigorous set of anecdotes (in the case of this article) or perhaps pretend to conduct a few low power research studies whose results wouldn't generalize (in the case of published research studies). largely this is an exercise at arriving at a conclusion that was decided prior and is independent of observation.

But you and the other people talking about the article seem to be going much further than that. It's one thing to say "I refuse to believe anyone can make an honest assessment of whether X is happening" (which is defensible in isolation, although I think even that is a kind of epistemological nihilism that IME is only ever selectively deployed against hypotheses one doesn't like. "isolated demands for rigor" etc.). But it's another thing entirely to slide from that into "therefore X isn't happening, and the worrying about it is caused by old fogeyism instead of any real trend".

The central claim of the article— that more and more students are arriving at college unable to complete reading tasks that many decades of prior incoming freshmen could do— is a concrete one. It may be hard to measure and subject to rose-tinted nostalgia bias, but it's not ineffable or unfalsifiable. It's a claim for which the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal, from the professors who have been doing this for a while, and only later might show up in something more quantitative and peer-reviewable. Saying that we should ignore the anecdotal data entirely (which, in the world where the trend was real, would be the only data we had for a while) and make no updates about the state of the world or an attempt to investigate more rigorously to find the truth of the matter, is a nutty way to form a world-model. It's also one that's weirdly STEM-brained ("only that which can be rigorously measured is real"), which is why I'm sort of weirded out that I'm the one arguing against it and instead insisting on the classically humanities-coded claim that we should also incorporate fuzzy, historically-informed information when deciding what to do.

Re: “the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal” from the above post.

Some of the evidence for the drop in literacy is thin. One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.

When Tumblr started talking about the Bleak House study, usually to disagree with it, I bit my tongue. I was thinking, "well, maybe it's mostly just Tumblr teenagers saying this". But when the New Yorker is dismissing it, I'm sorry, there's a serious problem.

No it is fucking not like "assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses"! What is wrong with you?!? These are incoming English literature majors being asked to read and understand a small amount of English literature.

The standard excuses getting trotted our here are maddening. You can't wave it off as "well, current readers can't be expected to know what the Lincoln's Inn Hall is like contemporary ones could"— the study specifically says the students were allowed to use any reference material they wanted for unfamiliar terms, and they still bombed.

Nor is the "well, this is a bad choice of book, it's too hard". This isn't Finnegans fucking Wake! Dickens had mass-market appeal and was a best-seller among commoners in his own time.

Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.