I actually don’t understand the meaning of that sentence in Dickens fully either.
> As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Why does “as if the waters had but newly retired” mean there’s a lot of water (and thus mud)? “As much mud as” clued me in, but I don’t get this part.
And apparently it’s also referencing not just some flood but the flood of Noah’s Ark from the Bible, which is why you might happen to see a dinosaur because it was such a long time ago. I guess I don’t come across many opportunities to think of / that remind me of Noah’s Ark because I didn’t think of that either.
> Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world.
Not really.
According to Nielsen, 59% of Russians read at least weekly. High, but not the highest in the world, and behind China:
https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/commentary/2017/maj...
Several European countries have a very strong reading rates, some exceeding 70% of adults reading books annually:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
What the author fails to understand is that merely consuming text is not the be-all-end-all of being an educated citizen. I am wary of trusting an author who is screaming from the rooftops about how the bad thing is coming, how the world sucks so much more now.
It's my opinion that writing is by far a more effective way to understand the world and the nuance in it. You could, theoretically, watch a video on YouTube, understand it, think about it, and then write out your thoughts and ideas and would be far more educated than someone merely reading a novel.
There is always a strange disconnect with egg head types where they fail to understand that information input is not the only way to become smart. And valuable information exists everywhere: a book, a blog entry, a podcast, a video, a movie, in the real world, etc. Thinking that text, which by the way is one of the most inefficient methods of information consumption, is the only way to be "smart" is incorrect. Critical thinking is what is desperately needed.
There's a further argument being made here that being literate changes the way you'd interpret and understand a YouTube video as you absorbed that information.
To be fair, author's point is more nuanced than "kids these days". He traces an evolution from: (i) an overly conservative but reality-based oral culture, to: (ii) a reality-detached and turbulent text-based culture, capable of envisioning our current technological era, back to (iii) another overly conservative oral culture. To me, the perceived threat seems to be how this second oral culture won't be based on direct experience of the real world, but on other people's (and AI's) interpretations of the latter: taking the worst parts of both previous cultures (i.e. you can't think outside the box, and your box isn't even real).
> The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’
Is anyone besides me with the villagers on this one? The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back!
> The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back!
More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
That kind of intellectually dominated "democracy" killed well over a hundred million people in the 20th century. And the people who promoted the horribly oppressive governments that did it--the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, etc.--were among the most intellectually sophisticated and literate people on the planet.
None of this is to say that illiteracy and ignorance are good things. They're not. I'm much better off in my personal life being literate and knowledgeable. But literacy and knowledge have limits, and the people who want to dictate how entire societies should be organized and run based on their literacy and knowledge are in over their heads. Basic human instincts and intuitions, like the ones those villagers had that Luria completely missed, contain valuable information too.
> he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs in order to assign every death under communism as a death caused by communism. It's not even intellectually dishonest, it's not intellectual at all.
If Stalin didn't kill enough people for you that you still feel the need to inflate the numbers, it's an indication of how many murders you're willing to excuse for your preferred system: "We only killed 50 million!"
For a salient example, see the "60,000" protestors killed in Iran. What's a few exploded schoolgirls in comparison to that?
> More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
This doesn't explain the difference between the collective farm workers, who were actually forced by the government to change their lives, and the villagers who were not forced to change their lives. Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
> the villagers who were not forced to change their lives
They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments.
> Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
> They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion, especially since you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person?
> Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
But that's the crucial question!
> Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion
Because they hadn't had the same experience--yet.
> you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person
Not fearful, suspicious.
> that's the crucial question!
You don't think it's possible for both things to be true? That literacy caused significant cognitive changes, and that the psychological dynamic I described was in play? I don't see how those two things are mutually exclusive.