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It's sad to see him buying into this silliness: > Remark. As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown i

It's sad to see him buying into this silliness: > Remark. As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate.

shubb 12y ago
When people gain a certain authority by being very smart in a narrow field, they often use it to talk about the problems of society in general. Because though they are an expert in their small field, but no more informed or unbiased than your friend at the pub, they end up sounding dumb. In this and some of other writings, he would do well to think and gather data about social issues, or talk mostly about algorithms.
- jodrellblank 12y ago
  All sorts of people talk about all sorts of things. When someone who is famous talks about all sorts of things, it's fashionable to diss and mock them for "speaking outside their authority", yet everyone else is free to ramble about whatever they like. You're doing an inverse arugment by authority here; "whatever Dijkstra says about [not-programming] is wrong and should not be listened to, because of who the speaker is".
  - shubb 12y ago
    Yeah, but he seems to be predicting the decline and fall of western civilisation because of unspecific use of language by young people these days. As there is no single definition of western civilisation, this is ironic as well as dumb. The man in the pub may have a good point. If you read Djikstra's other essays where he wanders off subject, you'll motice he rarely does. He sounds like an angry old man, lost in dreams of a better past that never was.
pnathan 12y ago
~2010 Literacy rates in the US are roughly 15ish% fully literate (it's a bit tangled to try and reduce down to a single number; the documents didn't give one, and the data files are in some odd format), according to the US literacy groups and their surveys. It's also worth noting that literacy for the councils on literacy is a pretty low bar. While I can't speak to total trend (measurements of literacy have changed, as have the prevalence of testing), it's fairly clear in a qualitative fashion that total reading capabilities have declined over the last 100 years. Examine pulps (cheap entertainment books) from the late 1800s, along with childrens' books of the time... significantly more complex paragraphs and much larger vocabulary.
- Chinjut 12y ago
  I'm going to demand a cite for the claim that only about 15% of the U.S. is literate. I'll also note that there's a distinction to be kept in mind between literacy (mastery of the artificial skill of using the written word) and fluency speaking one's native tongue (a skill all mentally healthy human beings pick up naturally).
  - pnathan 12y ago
    Quite reasonable! It's a SHOCKING claim. First, http://nces.ed.gov/naal/ http://nces.ed.gov/naal/ is the organization I was doing my reading with. Their surveys span the last 20 years. There's a 200-page PDF describing the surveys. Second, "literacy" is, as you point out, a nuanced term. NAAL has broken it out into 3 categories with 4 rankings possible from Below Basic to Proficient. Based on my reading of the survey questions, I drew the line of "literate" as "proficient". So, http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp is a summary page, and " Percentage of adults in each prose, document, and quantitative literacy level: 1992 and 2003" is the graph. You can see that the percentages are not collected into a single number. I made the ENTIRELY GROSS assumption that proficiency in one area probably leaks into the other areas. I would like to calculate the actual "Total proficiency" score based on the data though. At any rate, the percentages are abominable.

shubb 12y ago

When people gain a certain authority by being very smart in a narrow field, they often use it to talk about the problems of society in general. Because though they are an expert in their small field, but no more informed or unbiased than your friend at the pub, they end up sounding dumb. In this and some of other writings, he would do well to think and gather data about social issues, or talk mostly about algorithms.

jodrellblank 12y ago
All sorts of people talk about all sorts of things. When someone who is famous talks about all sorts of things, it's fashionable to diss and mock them for "speaking outside their authority", yet everyone else is free to ramble about whatever they like. You're doing an inverse arugment by authority here; "whatever Dijkstra says about [not-programming] is wrong and should not be listened to, because of who the speaker is".
- shubb 12y ago
  Yeah, but he seems to be predicting the decline and fall of western civilisation because of unspecific use of language by young people these days. As there is no single definition of western civilisation, this is ironic as well as dumb. The man in the pub may have a good point. If you read Djikstra's other essays where he wanders off subject, you'll motice he rarely does. He sounds like an angry old man, lost in dreams of a better past that never was.

pnathan 12y ago

~2010 Literacy rates in the US are roughly 15ish% fully literate (it's a bit tangled to try and reduce down to a single number; the documents didn't give one, and the data files are in some odd format), according to the US literacy groups and their surveys. It's also worth noting that literacy for the councils on literacy is a pretty low bar. While I can't speak to total trend (measurements of literacy have changed, as have the prevalence of testing), it's fairly clear in a qualitative fashion that total reading capabilities have declined over the last 100 years. Examine pulps (cheap entertainment books) from the late 1800s, along with childrens' books of the time... significantly more complex paragraphs and much larger vocabulary.

Chinjut 12y ago
I'm going to demand a cite for the claim that only about 15% of the U.S. is literate. I'll also note that there's a distinction to be kept in mind between literacy (mastery of the artificial skill of using the written word) and fluency speaking one's native tongue (a skill all mentally healthy human beings pick up naturally).
- pnathan 12y ago
  Quite reasonable! It's a SHOCKING claim. First, http://nces.ed.gov/naal/ http://nces.ed.gov/naal/ is the organization I was doing my reading with. Their surveys span the last 20 years. There's a 200-page PDF describing the surveys. Second, "literacy" is, as you point out, a nuanced term. NAAL has broken it out into 3 categories with 4 rankings possible from Below Basic to Proficient. Based on my reading of the survey questions, I drew the line of "literate" as "proficient". So, http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp is a summary page, and " Percentage of adults in each prose, document, and quantitative literacy level: 1992 and 2003" is the graph. You can see that the percentages are not collected into a single number. I made the ENTIRELY GROSS assumption that proficiency in one area probably leaks into the other areas. I would like to calculate the actual "Total proficiency" score based on the data though. At any rate, the percentages are abominable.