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Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? Yes. 21-23%. Or, higher, depending on how

by neilk 18y ago

Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? Yes. 21-23%. Or, higher, depending on how you count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. Correct again. The wikipedia article notes the high correlation of illiteracy to delinquency and crime. However, a counterexample. One of my first programming jobs was to create a data entry terminal in an industrial setting, replacing the giant paper sheets they used to fill out. When it was ready I beta-tested it on selected people from each shift. The interface was super simple, it just asked you a series of questions and you typed in the numbers -- I figured the guys in the plant would at least know how to deal with ATMs, so that was my metaphor. And it worked well. The best foreman in the plant brought a friend along -- I shrugged and let them take the test together. He interacted with it in a really weird way and required multiple repeats of the entire session before he understood it. I only realized later that he was illiterate. And, let me just restate: best foreman in the whole plant. He knew what numbers were, and he'd trained himself to fill out the correct numbers in the correct spots on the paper sheet. So that's when I added big icons and pictures to each screen, diagramming what bit of data we wanted at each stage.

edw519 18y ago
Nice story, neilk. My favorite system development anecdotes have always come from factory floors. Not quite sure why. Maybe because producing vs. not producing was always so much more visible than in a typical office.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good foreman. For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961): "I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics." "In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement." Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...
maw 18y ago
Of that 21-23%, how many of them are poor and uneducated immigrants whose children we can expect to be better educated? That's not to say it's good for there to be people so uneducated, but it might not be as bad as a naïve reading of official figures might make one think. Instead, it's the illiterate children of nonimmigrants that make me really worry, but I don't know how many of them are.
listic 18y ago
That's a striking case. But about that 21-23% figure.. Here in wikipedia is a map that shows <5% illiteracy in USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Literacy_rate_world.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Literacy_rate_world.svg
- neilk 18y ago
  Rates differ according to definition. It's clear that YouTube commenters aren't illiterate in the sense of total inability to read; they're typing, after all. 'Functional illiteracy' encompasses people who can read and write, but not with the fluency required to function in society, for instance, when understanding and completing a job application. Let's face it though; do you really think you live in a society where >95% of the population can read and write fluently? Educated people tend to live in a bit of a bubble, surrounded by others like them, but YouTube tells a different story.

by neilk 18y ago

edw519 18y ago

Nice story, neilk. My favorite system development anecdotes have always come from factory floors. Not quite sure why. Maybe because producing vs. not producing was always so much more visible than in a typical office.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good foreman. For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961): "I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics." "In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement." Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...

maw 18y ago

Of that 21-23%, how many of them are poor and uneducated immigrants whose children we can expect to be better educated? That's not to say it's good for there to be people so uneducated, but it might not be as bad as a naïve reading of official figures might make one think. Instead, it's the illiterate children of nonimmigrants that make me really worry, but I don't know how many of them are.

listic 18y ago

That's a striking case. But about that 21-23% figure.. Here in wikipedia is a map that shows <5% illiteracy in USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Literacy_rate_world.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Literacy_rate_world.svg

neilk 18y ago
Rates differ according to definition. It's clear that YouTube commenters aren't illiterate in the sense of total inability to read; they're typing, after all. 'Functional illiteracy' encompasses people who can read and write, but not with the fluency required to function in society, for instance, when understanding and completing a job application. Let's face it though; do you really think you live in a society where >95% of the population can read and write fluently? Educated people tend to live in a bit of a bubble, surrounded by others like them, but YouTube tells a different story.