she makes me so unsure of myself

i genuinely try not to get worked up over allegations of "literacy crisis" "nobody reads anymore" etc (yes i know that the everything about my blog does not really indicate that i try not to get worked up but i do try) because i think that anything in that lane can slide really easily into "kids these days"-style fearmongering which should always be treated with a healthy skepticism. not because it is impossible for it to be true kids these days whatever, but for the same old reason that gets trotted out that yes people have been thinking that the kids these days are dumber since writing was invented.

(on the other hand i do not think that generation z is comporting itself with dignity and i do think it's bad that we all watch more video than read anything that requires sustained focus -- and that we read more short form text (tweets, texts, captions) than any longer text that requires sustained focus and we watch more short form infinitely scrollable video than any video that requires sustained focus either ...)

but ok my point is that i read that atlantic article (https://archive.ph/hPgMM) that everyone is talking about on various shortform-text-firehose websites and i think it is interesting and i think it is probably correct about the cognition effects. and on the other hand people who are poasting about this keep pulling out this stat:

people keep remarking on this as if it is notably bad. it is clearly framed in the article as notably bad. only 2 percent! but on the other hand what percentage of all adults would you like expect to read to children on any given day...? the denominator isn't parents, it's all american adults, so whatever proportion of adults who are neither parents nor in teaching or childcare as a profession is almost automatically excluded. and for how long in childhood is it likely that a child is read to, by someone else, most days? like a parent of a sixth-grader isn't reading aloud to their kid.

also you can go look at the study yourself it's linked in the article it's linked right here and you can look at this graph

so first of all the 236,000 american adults were surveyed between 2003 and 2023. that 2% of 236,000 includes people who filled out the survey anytime in those 20 years. the graph breaks these out by when they were surveyed, and as you can see, the proportion of respondents who read with children doesn't really change -- while the proportion of respondents who read for themselves actually does decrease notably between 2003 and 2023. so it really seems as if that 2% figure is like the normal amount of adults who would read to children daily especially in the era of television. which again was probably the beginning of the end of literacy, but my point is, it isn't a post-internet/post-social media phenomenon, and it doesn't dovetail with, for instance, parents of young children giving them ipads instead of engaging face-to-face. there were no ipad babies in 2003 i know this because i was a baby in 2003 and i did not have an ipad

anyway this is one stat in an article that i think otherwise is in broad strokes correct about the problem but i don't know i think it reflects poorly on an argument to throw out spurious data points for punctuative effect. it's the strategy of a sensationalist and in an essay that is arguing that reading and writing have allowed for ordered, logical reasoning and argumentation (true!) and that the decline of literacy causes a decline in the ability to make and interpret reasoned arguments, that strategy is incongruous with the aim.

i'm taking off my michael hobbes hat now. yesterday at work while i was shredding huge amounts of documents and reorganizing the world's most evil filing cabinets i was listening to an episode of the know your enemy podcast about the gettysburg address and i was awed by the power of language when it is intentional and masterful. it feels very trite -- and they discuss this in the podcast, how the gettysburg address has been so fully absorbed by american culture that the words are just like breathing, since you heard the words or snippets of them so many times when you were still young enough that you couldn't really understand it -- that as an american child you know the phrase "four score and seven years ago" before you know what "four score and seven" adds up to -- but yes i of my own accord went and reread the text of the gettysburg address and yes i was amazed by it. (of course i have to make the obvious point that the gettysburg address is oratory and it was written with the strategies of oratory.. of writing to be read aloud. parallelism. anaphora. i was made to take a class on rhetoric in tenth grade. i can throw out these words.)

in the allegedly post-literate world we are bombarded by words constantly. i don't know if this is true but it certainly feels plausible that with all this scrolling, we encounter more of the written word on any given day than humans have at any point in history. llms create a glut of smooth, inoffensive (stomach-churningly inoffensive) prose without intentional construction (and an overabundance of stock phrases that evoke the constructions of genuine argument without making it so. It's Not X, It's Y.). as such, the ratio of "words labored over" to "words read" is lower than it ever has been. i know that people have pointed out that the reflexive anti-ai thing where we're all like "it is Important to Work on that email you send someone because Work is Dignifying" is very protestant and whatever and i get that. but i mean, the reason i had a weirdly emotional reaction to reading the gettysburg address of my own accord on my own time as an adult is that the construction is beautiful. and effective. which is why we quote it.