As sidenote, have had conversations before about whether we are in a literacy bubble and what that would mean haha
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @kevinakwok
If you consider "the skill which is practicing religious devotions", I'd describe our society as having once distributed it extremely broadly at substantial costs, before deciding slowly and then quickly that society was overproviding it. I do not think reading is immune to this
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A thing underappreciated in our social class is that reading for leisure is an extremely niche activity and that our estimation of the population's literacy is much higher than tests would measure it.
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Replying to @patio11 @michael_nielsen
Yes agreed strongly with these. To add some more. Like paving the roads--we spent a huge amount of energy enforcing and setting strong norms for literacy on entire population, which had high returns
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as Patrick says, we personally view literacy as a good unto itself. But unclear that society or most individuals view it this way. Literacy should and will only get propagated on a generational time frame if ROI on it is high
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ROI historically *has* been high because it not only allows individuals more leverage to do things, but also having *everyone* be literate has advantages societally since it allows things to be built assuming certain level of user or employee literacy
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weak form of argument of it falling is that we may be hitting diminishing return on literacy. In fact we need continuously growing value to each level of literacy to expect to see it continue to increase. If you made utility curve of literacy, unclear right now would look strong
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but stronger form of argument is that we are seeing new formats rise that will slowly obsolete literacy for many segments of populace. Video is not new, video is in person at scale. What do I mean by this, in person is high bandwidth but has certain downsides.
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1) not doable at distance 2) hard to do one to many or many to many 3) cannot be stored 4) hard to make composable etc
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For a vision of the future here, come on out to Harajuku, where both sides of the linguistic marketplace decided "Hmm 100 points of fluency seems very valuable but 5 points of fluency seems very expensive eff it how about my cell phone talks to your cell phone."
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