flesh & blood amongst war machines

I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)

The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.

This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.

Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.

Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.

You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.

Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.

(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)

the op is fine, it's just complaining about things the author doesn't like that they keep seeing. that's fair.

but this addition's cited sources are not great, and their argument is making sweeping judgements that i don't think are appropriate.

the fortune article linked is an opinion piece that only cites anecdotal evidence from grumpy professors, and from the use of words like "coddling" and the fact that the extreme "single sentence" example is given NO elaboration whatsoever, i suspect it is primarily, as i said, grumpy generational warfare about how the kids these days are always on their damn phone. it even mentions at least one professor that finds their students love reading when given the opportunity, so there's not even consensus about it.

the "low adult literacy" argument seems very ill-applied to me. i'm not sure where prev got the "6th grade reading level or less" figure, because neither the article nor the explanation of the levels of literacy that is linked in the article uses that figure.

the description of "level 2" literacy is as follows:

At this level, texts may be presented in a digital or print medium and may comprise continuous, noncontinuous, or mixed types. Tasks at this level require respondents to make matches between the text and information and may require paraphrasing or low-level inferences. Some competing pieces of information may be present. Some tasks require the respondent to: cycle through or integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria; compare and contrast or reason about information requested in the question; or navigate within digital texts to access and identify information from various parts of a document.

and level 3 literacy explicitly mentions multiple pages as a criteria. people lower than that are struggling to understand SHORT WORKSHEETS, not novels. they struggle to navigate the internet (which you may have noticed is largely text based) as well, so the 58% of americans that struggle with literacy are NOT reading booktok books and leaving goodreads reviews.

moreover, it isn't Kids These Days, it's a goddamn class issue.

What’s more, several of the counties with the nation’s very lowest adult literacy performance are located in these southern states. For example, the 10 counties with the highest percentage of their populations at or below Level 1 literacy are in Texas, primarily along the U.S.-Mexican border.  

While Feinberg said anyone can have low literacy, adults who have poor reading skills tend to live in underserved communities with few resources, or what she calls a “print desert.” In these areas, she said there is little signage beyond local stores as well as few libraries and bookstores.

furthermore, in reading more about the report on adult literacy, i don't think it's very appropriate to frame things as a new problem. the test has only been administered 3 times so far (4, technically, but the additional point in 2014 was checking prisons specifically and is not relevant here), so while there IS a notable drop from 2017-2023 compared to 2012-2017, three data points is not really enough to establish a new crisis as opposed to just normal variance. there just isn't enough data on this type of literacy, compared to the "can you read at all" literacy tests of the past.

this bit:

Feinberg said this “crisis” of low adult literacy is not a crisis at all. Instead, it is an intergenerational cycle that “affects society in every possible way.” “I think that really is the key point,” she said. “How do we break this intergenerational cycle of low literacy, which leads to poverty?”

definitely seems to imply that it's not a new problem.

i have no idea where the "cognitive flexibility" citation is supposed to lead, because it actually just leads back to the illiteracy report. and considering how poorly applied the previous sources are, i frankly don't trust any of the assertions made here explaining what cognitive flexibility is and how it relates to literacy. "cognitive flexibility" IN GENERAL refers to the executive function of task-switching and cognitive shifting, which are skills used in learning new tasks in general (and thus it would make sense that inflexibility could make it hard to LEARN to read), but are NOT particularly relevant to understand nuanced motivations or complex morality. so i have no idea what prev is talking about here, without their source i most certainly do NOT believe "the reverse is also true."

the entire previous reblog reads like reactionary nonsense, with some "here's how i find good books" extrapolated into "everyone is stupider than me" bias.

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

Howdy!

I’d like, uh, two normal rolls.

Sure thing!

And one with the… With the pumpkin seeds.

Which do you mean?

The one with the… With the seeds.

What are they called?

Uhm… A, uh, “crunchy pumpky.”

Sure thing. Would you like anything else?

Uhh… I’ll also take a, uh… A… A Nutella donut…?

Unfortunately, I don’t know at all what you mean…

A… One of those right there!

You really must tell me, what’s it called??

I… I’m… I’m a dumb piece of shit.

Sure thing! Anything else?

That one there?

You know what you need to do. [Here she switches from the formal, customer service voice to addressing him casually and familiarly.]

I… I’m a little greedy pig, oink oink?

Do it!

[grunts like a pig]

That comes to €13.50, please! Have a beautiful day!

in short - nobody has your password. every online service uses servers, and these servers should not, under any circumstances, store your password, and if they do, the do not comply security standards and you honestly should stay as far away from their service as possible, no matter what that service is.

"but Agam," you may ask, "how does the website know the password is correct when i log in, if it doesn't even know it?"

you see, it stores something called a cryptographic hash (no, not the currency thing, that's something else).

basically: imagine for a moment that there exists a function, an operation of some kind, that you can run on any sequence of letters and digits and sumbols, and get a different sequence of symbols, that is unique* to any input you can use. imagine also, that this operation cannot* be reversed; you cant take the output of this function and trace back what input was used to produce it. this magic function is called a cryptographic hash.

instead of storing your password directly, the server runs a cryptographic hash on it and stores the result. the next time you enter a password, the server takes your input and runs the cryptographic hash on it as well - then compares the result to the one that it has stored.

because the operation cannot* be reversed, no matter WHO has your data, it is practically impossible to know your password.

this is also why when you select "i forgot my password" these days, you never get your password sent to you - because nobody has it. instead, you have to select a new one without ever seeing the old one.

now, few things to note here. for one, the astrixes that i kept using: "unique" isnt entirely correct here, sonce there could technically be two passwords that produce the same cryptographic hash; what this practically means is that there is some random password that the server will count as correct despite not being the correct password. since nobody can guess that password either, it's not that bad. two - it technically IS possible to reverse a cryptographic hash, but should take an incredibly long time - ideally, lifetime-of-the-universe long.

lastly - there ARE databases with pre-computed cryptographic hashes for common passwords, which are meant for speeding up this process. for this purpose, most hashes nowadays use something called a salt value - a second input value provided to that hash function WITH the input password, that is changing for each user. that way, since nobody can predict what the salt value is, the hash value cannot be pre-computed.

math is good, kids, it protects you from mega-corporates.

here's a nice lil video about this very topic (Tom Scott my beloved):

Katara: BOY???? HOT BOY?????? HOT TEENAGE BOY?????????

Zuko: *speaks*

And then it hit me.

Iroh: *sitting in a teahouse at a paisho table* Iroh, deadpan: I must capture the last airbender.  Iroh: It is the only way to make sure the powe rof the Avatar won’t be turned on the Fire Nation. Iroh: Only then will I be redeemed in the eyes of the Fire Lord for my failure at Ba Sing Se. Iroh: … Iroh: Anyway, it’s your turn.

he was the eldest son of fire lord sozin, who knew the avatar was the greatest threat to the fire nation, but also knew the new one would be a firebender and he couldn’t exactly merc his own people, now could he? but he always planned to order a convenient little assassination on whoever the new avatar turned out to be and in the meantime took out the air temples so that avatar couldn’t learn the next element in the cycle. of course, when it turns out to be his son, sozin, stellar dad that he is, thinks “if you want something done right” and shoots a fire blast at his firstborn.

zuko enters the avatar state, blows up half the palace, etc etc as one does, gets a nasty scar for his trouble, and escapes, hence why he was hanging out far enough south to necessitate katara and sokka cracking open a cold boy a century later.

all this is to say 1. i think it’s a good way to maintain zuko’s background and characterization in an au like this and 2. it leads to a secret second roleswap