4 ms·

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, t

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes. I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.

jimbokun 4mo ago
> nobody can read a bill Especially not our politicians.
jhbadger 4mo ago
Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.
- stult 4mo ago
  That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms. Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.
  - jhbadger 4mo ago
    I think you overestimate how much the average person can understand opaque jargon like "party of the first part". I'm sure good legal writing can avoid these things, but often (such as in the licenses people are theoretically supposed to click on that they have read and agree to for software), the opaqueness is the point -- they don't really want the user to understand what they are agreeing to.
  - ludicrousdispla 4mo ago
    "comprising" and "consisting of" have very different meanings in patent law, but I expect most people would consider them synonymous.
- ipsento606 4mo ago
  > It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.
  - ngriffiths 4mo ago
    It is not written though
duped 4mo ago
Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.
- awepofiwaop 4mo ago
  Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses. If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.
atmavatar 4mo ago
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not? In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern. A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion. A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.
- throwaway2016a 4mo ago
  > Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not? This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time. In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.
  - Balgair 4mo ago
    > In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.
    - throwaway2016a 4mo ago
beej71 4mo ago
The author should have said "read a voter information pamphlet".
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument Really? I have no legal training. I can follow a SCOTUS opinion and most local legislation.
marcus_holmes 4mo ago
> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days. I'm not sure it matters anyway. I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points. I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points. I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM. If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos. The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies. We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.
  - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
    Define "power". If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are. But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely. The next generation are just further along on this curve. And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing. It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.
KevinMS 4mo ago
> are the voters who will not be able to read a bill politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large
thefz 4mo ago
A literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.
godelski 4mo ago
> which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it Literacy isn't just the ability to read words, it's the ability to interpret them. You can read while still being illiterate
- ngriffiths 4mo ago
  Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.

jimbokun 4mo ago

> nobody can read a bill Especially not our politicians.

jhbadger 4mo ago

Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.

stult 4mo ago
That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms. Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.
- jhbadger 4mo ago
  I think you overestimate how much the average person can understand opaque jargon like "party of the first part". I'm sure good legal writing can avoid these things, but often (such as in the licenses people are theoretically supposed to click on that they have read and agree to for software), the opaqueness is the point -- they don't really want the user to understand what they are agreeing to.
- ludicrousdispla 4mo ago
  "comprising" and "consisting of" have very different meanings in patent law, but I expect most people would consider them synonymous.
ipsento606 4mo ago
> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.
- ngriffiths 4mo ago
  It is not written though

duped 4mo ago

Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.

awepofiwaop 4mo ago
Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses. If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.

atmavatar 4mo ago

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not? In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern. A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion. A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.

throwaway2016a 4mo ago
> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not? This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time. In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.
- Balgair 4mo ago
  > In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.
  - throwaway2016a 4mo ago

beej71 4mo ago

The author should have said "read a voter information pamphlet".

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

> nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument Really? I have no legal training. I can follow a SCOTUS opinion and most local legislation.

marcus_holmes 4mo ago

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days. I'm not sure it matters anyway. I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points. I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points. I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM. If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos. The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies. We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  Define "power". If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are. But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely. The next generation are just further along on this curve. And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing. It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.

KevinMS 4mo ago

> are the voters who will not be able to read a bill politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large

thefz 4mo ago

A literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.

godelski 4mo ago

> which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it Literacy isn't just the ability to read words, it's the ability to interpret them. You can read while still being illiterate

ngriffiths 4mo ago
Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.