Just as the title asks I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading.
They’ll read it and despite all the information being there, if it’s even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it’s complete gibberish or indecipherable.
Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it’s making me lose my fucking mind.
just because they’re not reading comprehensive skills doesn’t mean they’re not learning
I always hated that about redditers. They love to pretend they don’t understand people and then feel like they get bonus points if they can intentionally misconstrue your statements to be offensive or wrong.
I’m seeing that a lot here too, mostly from politically aggressive folks
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Common core will do that
Actually, I’ve started to notice this in myself, rather than in others.
It is not exactly sudden, it’s creeping for the last 20, 30 years.
No, this talk of “poor reading comprehension” is always such nonsense. Arrogant, defensive nonsense. It’s always peddled by people who get huffy when someone disagrees with them. Instead of considering anything wrong about what they said, they conclude that what they wrote is perfectly fine and the issue must be with whoever is criticizing them. And of course the issue is their intelligence. “Surely, no one would disagree with me if they actually understood what I meant! Those heathens ought read a book!”
When people clamour on about reading comp, I always just wonder: How could anyone be that naive? To think that human communication, stripped of the face, the voice, the presence, the context, the body language, reduced to text on a glowing plastic pop tart, would be so straightforward? How do you not see the myriad ways a single line can be interpreted? How do you not recognize the influence of all these different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences can have on how a single line is taken?
How the fuck can you reduce all of the nuance in language and text down to, “Oh, I guess you’re just an idiot”? And how many of you are eager to jump on things I say here, such as that word choice “idiot”? As if to say “That word wasn’t in the OP, you don’t get it!”, as if it wasn’t a deliberate choiced based on my interpretation of OPs claim, and as if that doesn’t just demonstrate the ambiguity of text? Or whatever other protests you’d make - I can think of a dozen things I wrote already that could be misread. I trust you to get it, and I truat you to ask if you don’t.
This shit is never simple! Stop reducing it to “reading comprehension” and deflecting all culpability from yourself while simultaneously disparaging others’ perspectives. If language were that straightforward, it wouldn’t be complex enough to handle human experience.
This post was actually conceived after a large amount of people were confused by a 4chan green text meme. The information was all there just not written in the average sentence structure. Also I’m generally very good at making sure I’m understood and will even change my word choice for better understanding.
But no I’m just an asshole who’s never wrong.
So if it wasn’t written in the average sentence structure, why is that poor reading comp and not poor writing comp? Couldn’t you argue either one, depending on who you want to criticize?
How can you say you’re good at making sure you’re understood and yet also say people struggle with reading comp? Are you saying that people don’t struggle with your words, but you watch them struggle with things others wrote that you understand? Are you sure about that? Or are you drawing self-serving conclusions here?
Ultimately that’s all this discussion can be. If you assert that there’s some sort of standard of “reading comprehension” and that some people lack this intelligence, you’re already starting a conversation that puts you above them. You float right on by the central struggle of human conversation - being understood - and just pick your favorite winners and losers.
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I don’t quite get your meaning here, could eli5
Yes, every time someone disagrees with me they are clearly demonstrating how bad reading comprehension has become in the modern day. It’s so hard being as smart and correct all the time as I am.
yes, reading code to people, basic interpretation. It’s a pattern that I think comes post Cambridge Analytica media tactics.
My new job has 18 people in a training class where we are asked to read the content out loud. The amount of grown ass adults that will literally make up different words blows my mind.
I recently got into a long, really dumb argument. I used the phrase “lesser of two evils” and what seemed like fifty people (actually two or three) seemed to think that meant I approved of, strenuously endorsed, and would defend the actions of the “lesser evil.”
To me, this seemed like a basic misunderstanding of what the phrase meant, so I defined it. Their response to my definition was to say the same sort of thing they’d already said while claiming to totally know what “lesser of two evils” meant.
I lost my cool, and explained what the phrase meant again. One of the folks explained themselves calmly while the others seemed to think I was a congenital idiot because I kept repeating myself.
I don’t want this to get any longer, so I’ll just say that we were talking past each other. Nobody (well, except fr the one guy who stopped to explain what he meant) was really comprehending what the other person said. So everyone was a dumbass, basically. Story of my life, really.
At least, I think that’s what happened. Watch the asshole who called me a liar and an idiot show up here to not explain how I’m a liar and an idiot again.
That sounds more like someone just rejecting all “lesser of two evils” scenarios rather than a reading comprehension problem.
Yes, that was the gist of their point I think. The thinking being that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil. My point was that if evil is going to win no matter what you do, isn’t it better to pick which evil you’re going to have to deal with?
It’s seldom the case that the lesser of two evils has to win save when you aren’t allowed to choose a good path because of entrenched interests better served by evil.
Are you familiar with the U.S. Presidential electoral process?
Exactly the situation described. It’s possible to fix that process but too many entrenched interests render this impossible
Mm, I think what you’re likely arguing about is super contentious, AND complex. I agree that picking the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil (because it is, it says so right in the phrase!). That isn’t to say you’re necessarily endorsing the second evil, or that youre evil for making the choice. The world is fucked up and complex and no one is perfectly good.
But yeah I think conversations around voting, especially in the US, are really difficult to have because people are extremely opinionated and none of us REALLY know what would happen if we stopped voting altogether, which makes a lot of people anxiously compelled to do it(such as myself)
Or a troll. There are trolls, even here.
Lol, Lemmy is still small enough that I know the thread you are talking about. It was a political discussion, yeh?
If I remember right most of the people who argued with you were from hexbear, which tracks lol.
Yeah, that’s the one. I figured I’m small potatoes so no one’s gonna bother looking it up. It never even occurred to me that someone might have already seen it lol.
I don’t think it’s a reading comprehension problem, it’s some sort of cultural problem. These people are reading what we are typing, but that’s not what they want to talk about. So they will take anything, even tangentially related and disprove a component of it so they can reframe the conversation back to what they wanted to argue about.
I actually find myself doing similar things. Essentially I will write out a long winded comment, then realize that the person I am replying to has nothing to do with what I wanted to say. Instead I was paraphrasing all of the comments, coming up with a point I wanted to make and then ramming it round peg square hole style into someone else’s comment tree. I have been deleting a lot of comments before even hitting the post button in the last 6 months or so since I realized I was doing it.
TLDR: A lot of people online are not arguing in good faith.
As an uninvolved party, after reading the thread, I understand that you feel frustrated and misunderstood. But I’m sorry to say that I feel like the failure of reading comprehension was on your part more than theirs.
It seems like the majority of people who responded to you argued that there are not two evils, but two parts to the same whole evil.
No one, that I saw, claimed you were saying that the Democrats were not evil. But the disagreement was that you see the Republicans and Democrats as two evils, while your opponents see them as one.
Whether or not you agree, that seems like a logically coherent belief to hold.
As an uninvolved party…
Sigh. Not uninvolved anymore I guess.
When one guy stopped calling me names and arguing against points I wasn’t trying to make, I backed down and listened and then acknowledged that he had a point.
I’m not rehashing the argument again. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go into my post history and throw things back in my face. I don’t know what the etiquette is, but it seems rude.
