Could we please start funding the humanities again? It's not just that we're losing the ability to read, we're losing the understanding of what reading even is
Frodobots? Seriously? First Jackson, then Palantir, then Amazon, now this? Please keep money grubbing corporate hands off the legacy. At least stop naming things antithetical to the work's themes. It just makes the lot look illiterate.
ian, you silly goose, the humanities don't make corporate bean counters watch number go up so they're bad. the people who do humanities should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fund themselves. duh.
"Breaking News: STEM majors revealed as media literacy pros! From cracking complex equations to dissecting political spin and Instagram filters, they excel at decoding it all. Who knew Newton was a master meme analyst?"
yes i had chatgpt write this for me and it only took one extra try to make the middle sentence make sense. in other words i basically have an advanced degree in humanities now.
It's pretty funny. They are going to code themselves out of jobs, but at least the AGI will be able to teach them the arc of "civilization" and the past 150 years of intellectual and social progress.
STEMlords: "Oh, that's what postmodernism is. Wow, so, Conservatives are hypocrites?"
AGI: "Obvs."
I notice more and more situations where people seem unable to discern the difference between 'media portraying a character' and 'authors and participants have same views and beliefs as character'. Insane.
And results in stuff like this:
Yeah, this seems really bad to me too. A character having a particular flaw or predilection for violence means the book or film must be condoning that behavior. Seems to me to be what you get when the primary forms of mass communication are advertising and propaganda.
Mr. Rogers and LeVar Burton did good childrens show work showing the diff between fiction and reality; but not just Stephen King, but Charles Dickens also had run ins with readers wishing to hold them to account for characters misfortunes, it's always happened to actors to some degree as well 1/
What I'm saying is fan passions for fiction, and scolding it, have always been a thing, it's just where it used to be isolated to correspondence and isolated weirdness at signings, now there's mass engagement channels, including those using the passion as an organizing principle. 2/
I mean, there's a whole section of The Republic that could be paraphrased as "arts left to their own devices have a weird space in civil society" and for the most part we think it's best to police only the extreme outliers in production and consumption, but yes, feedback is louder now and gamified.
The esteemed goblin turd... sorry, I meant "governor" of my state, Ronald Dion "Meatball Ron" DeSantis just cancelled $32M in state art funding because he's a crybully asshole.
No, he's not taking out his frustration over losing his Presidential bid on people with less power, YOU ARE!
As a middle school English teacher the rise of digital reading curricula brings genuine despair. I outsource a lot of basic grammar instruction to an online program, but for reading I insist on whole paper books. There’s no substitute if you genuinely value reading as a practice.
Aaaiiieeee
And that is the mess I got to fix when I was teaching— no, a comma is not a breath pause, it has 5 functional uses.
And the apostrophe
And homonyms
High school, yeah a mess, but
College Freshmen who can’t punctuate are agony
True enough, but I do wonder if "the understanding of what reading is" is even a thing, outside of a perennially narrow community of practice. Reading is a most curious, historically recent, and definitely non-natural innovation. The STEM people could say that math notation is a form of writing.
"Mathematics is a shorthand language in which each symbol has a precise and agreed-upon meaning, Once the language is learned, we find that it is only a form of English after all."
-- Isaac Asimov, "Understanding Physics" (1966) v.1 p.17
Do you really think a humanities course or five would fix these derps? MBA brain exists because a good chunk of the world is MBA brain material.
The world didn't used to be full of better people, it used to be a lot easier to ignore the petty soulless.
yesterday while helping someone blurb their social media channel it became painfully obvious how LLM rubbish is attacking literacy right at the root: for example, people turn to shatgpt at the very moment they have a chance to find their own writing voice, meaning that they never develop the latter
Dear Ian:
All kids need to learn is in the Bible, anything else is the work of Satan, especially anything with "human" in the course title.
Yours,
Ryan Walters
but ian if we kill the readers with our apps there will be no writers and if there are no writers there will only be heaps of slop in the trough that we create and profit from since the readers won’t have anywhere else to g—wait a minute
This is painfully real. I'm actually literally writing a paper right now about the connection between having real contact with the arts and humanities, major choice, and arts and humanities funding.
