Literacy is Decreasing Among the Intellectual Class
(Cross-posted from my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp)
Oh, you read Emily Post’s Etiquette? What version? There’s a significant difference between versions, and that difference reflects the declining literacy of the American intellectual.
I looked into this because I noticed books published before the ’70s or ’80s seemed to be written with an assumption of the reader’s competence that is no longer present in many modern texts.
Take Emily Post’s Etiquette. The force of her intellect and personality came through in the 1922 original:
When gentlemen are introduced to each other they always shake hands. When a gentleman is introduced to a lady, she sometimes puts out her hand— especially if he is some one she has long heard about from friends in common, but to an entire stranger she generally merely bows her head slightly and says: “How do you do!” Strictly speaking, it is always her place to offer her hand or not as she chooses, but if he puts out his hand, it is rude on her part to ignore it. Nothing could be more ill-bred than to treat curtly any overture made in spontaneous friendliness. No thoroughbred lady would ever refuse to shake any hand that is honorable, not even the hand of a coal heaver at the risk of her fresh white glove. Those who have been drawn into a conversation do not usually shake hands on parting. But there is no fixed rule. A lady sometimes shakes hands after talking with a casual stranger; at other times she does not offer her hand on parting from one who has been punctiliously presented to her. She may find the former sympathetic and the latter very much the contrary. Very few rules of etiquette are inelastic and none more so than the acceptance or rejection of the strangers you meet. There is a wide distance between rudeness and reserve. You can be courteously polite and at the same time extremely aloof to a stranger who does not appeal to you, or you can be welcomingly friendly to another whom you like on sight. Individual temperament has also to be taken into consideration: one person is naturally austere, another genial. The latter shakes hands far more often than the former. As already said, it is unforgivably rude to refuse a proffered hand, but it is rarely necessary to offer your hand if you prefer not to.
The reader is assumed to understand basic ideas, and trusted to use their judgment to navigate social situations. Now take the modern Centennial Edition of Etiquette released in 2022:
The handshake is the American standard for a respectful gesture of greeting. It is a gesture with deep symbolic roots, and says “I come in friendship, I mean you well, I have no weapon, please take my hand, you can trust me.” It is an offer to touch, something that is a rare occurrence among strangers, acquaintances, and colleagues. It is kept brief and contained within a simple gesture, and even so, the act of human contact means so much. When the social distancing measures of the COVID-19 pandemic pulled us apart, one of the biggest questions people asked about etiquette was whether the handshake would come back. Let us assure you, it is as important now as ever. It is a classic that is automatic to a great many. When someone reaches out a hand, it’s very difficult to refuse it. There are five elements to a good handshake: eye contact, a smile or friendly expression, a good grip, the right amount of energy, and letting go at the right time.
It then goes on to describe each of these five elements in detail in a numbered list. Modern readers love a good numbered list, or a bullet-point list. Much easier than paragraphs, which to the modern reader are like the open ocean, and carry a risk of drowning.
The empty sentences grate. The explanation of the obvious is painful. Notice how much focus is on the physical mechanics of shaking a hand, rather than on understanding of social rules. And does the reader really need to be told about the “deep symbolic roots” of the handshake, or that they need to put “the right amount of energy” into it? If so, is it really necessary to later explain in further detail exactly what that means? I’d have thought the phrase “the right amount of energy” itself was clear and didn’t require elaboration. But Emily Post’s descendants disagree.
A person might have been excused for thinking the 2022 version would be much like the original, only updated to account for modern etiquette. But unless you did your homework, you wouldn’t realize you’d been robbed! Instead of the vigorous style of classic Post:
Nothing shows less consideration for others than to whisper and rattle programmes and giggle and even make audible remarks throughout a performance. Very young people love to go to the theater in droves called theater parties and absolutely ruin the evening for others who happen to sit in front of them. If Mary and Johnny and Susy and Tommy want to talk and giggle, why not arrange chairs in rows for them in a drawing-room, turn on a phonograph as an accompaniment and let them sit there and chatter! If those behind you insist on talking it is never good policy to turn around and glare. If you are young they pay no attention, and if you are older—most young people think an angry older person the funniest sight on earth! The small boy throws a snowball at an elderly gentleman for no other reason! The only thing you can do is to say amiably: “I’m sorry, but I can’t hear anything while you talk.” If they still persist, you can ask an usher to call the manager.
You get this:
As an audience member at a seated performance, your biggest goal is not to disrupt anything—neither the performers nor the people seated near you. This definitely means turning cell phones off and double-checking to make sure they are. Don’t be that person whose phone rings in the middle of a performance. Don’t bring in anything to eat or drink that isn’t allowed, and even if it is allowed, avoid anything with a noisy wrapper or that will rattle in a box. Silent foods, if any, are the best choice, but usually you can’t eat during the show. Ushers may be present at a theater or larger venue to help you find your seat or guide you in and out of the theater when the lights are low or the show is going on. They can also help if you have a question or need assistance. If you are late and missed the dimming of the lobby lights that indicate the show is about to start, an usher may have you wait until a natural break in the performance and then help you to your seat. If an usher asks you to be quiet during a show, it’s important to politely take their cue.
Apparently modern people need to be told to ask questions when they have a question, and to not ignore an usher when he tells them to be quiet. If Emily Post had been less polite, maybe she’d have told her grandchildren they were nitwits and to keep their hands off her book.
Another book which has been continually published for more than a century is Gray’s Anatomy — the “doctor’s bible” that’s the namesake of the medical TV-show of the same name (though the show spells Grey with an ‘e’). I wanted to see if the same pattern held up as with Emily Post’s Etiquette. It’s a bit hard, since the book has expanded a lot since the original, which was only concerned with muscles, bones, and joints, and made nearly no mention of even the human heart! The modern version is a complete map of human anatomy. Nevertheless, I found some similar passages in the 1860 version:
The Coccyx, so called from resembling a cuckoo’s beak, is usually formed of four small segments of bone, the most rudimentary parts of the vertebral column. In each of the first three segments may be traced a rudimentary body, articular and transverse processes; the last piece (sometimes the third) being merely a rudimentary nodule of bone, without distinct processes.
And the 2020 version:
The coccyx is a small, triangular bone and is often asymmetric in shape. It usually consists of four fused rudimentary vertebrae, although the number varies from three to five, and the first is sometimes separate. The bone is directed downwards and ventrally from the sacral apex; its pelvic surface is tilted upwards and forwards, its dorsum downwards and backwards.
They are both quite information-dense (as is the human body). It’s not easy to say one of these quotations is better than the other, or more simplified. Look at this snippet from the introduction of the 2020 edition:
Anatomy is the study of the structure of the body. Conventionally, it is divided into topographical (macroscopic or gross) anatomy (which may be further divided into regional anatomy, surface anatomy, neuroanatomy, endoscopic and imaging anatomy); developmental anatomy (embryogenesis and subsequent organogenesis); and the anatomy of microscopic and submicroscopic structure (histology). Anatomical language is one of the fundamental languages of medicine. The unambiguous description of thousands of structures is impossible without an extensive and often highly specialized vocabulary. Ideally, these terms, which are often derived from Latin or Greek, should be used to the exclusion of any other, and eponyms should be avoided. In reality, this does not always happen. Many terms are vernacularized and, around the world, synonyms and eponyms still abound in the literature, in medical undergraduate classrooms and in clinics and operating theatres. The 2nd edition of the Terminologia Anatomica, 1 drawn up by the Federative Committee on Anatomical Terminology (FCAT) and newly published in 2019, continues to serve as our reference source for the terminology for macroscopic anatomy, and the text of the 42nd edition of Gray’s Anatomy is almost entirely TA2-compliant. However, where terminology is at variance with, or, more likely, is not included in, the TA, the alternative term used either is cited in the relevant consensus document or position paper, or enjoys widespread clinical usage. Synonyms and eponyms are given in parentheses on first usage of a preferred term and not shown thereafter in the text; an updated list of eponyms and short biographical details of the clinicians and anatomists whose names are used in this way is available in the e-book for reference purposes (see Preface, p. ix, for further discussion of the use of eponyms).
It seems the 2020 Gray’s Anatomy is written at a similar reading level to the 1860 edition. I would have concluded from this experiment that I was wrong, and that Emily Post’s Etiquette was an unfortunate exception, but there was one thing that bothered me: I have met many doctors in my life. Some of them were quite bright. But many were simply not intelligent enough that I would believe they had ever read and understood an entire textbook written in this fashion. Some, I’m surprised they can tell a stepstool from a stethoscope.
I did some digging, and it turns out that while the original Gray’s Anatomy was written specifically for medical students, the newer version is used as a reference text, and is considered too dense for medical students. The reading level of the original has been preserved, but its purpose has shifted.
Even more digging revealed that there’s a new Gray’s Anatomy for Students that fills in the role of the original. Let’s take a look:
Anatomy forms the basis for the practice of medicine. Anatomy leads the physician toward an understanding of a patient’s disease, whether he or she is carrying out a physical examination or using the most advanced imaging techniques. Anatomy is also important for dentists, chiropractors, physical therapists, and all others involved in any aspect of patient treatment that begins with an analysis of clinical signs. The ability to interpret a clinical observation correctly is therefore the endpoint of a sound anatomical understanding.
Ah, there’s that 21st-century hollowness! That disrespectful prose that tells the reader what they must already know! The 1860 Gray’s Anatomy needed no introduction at all. It was assumed the medical students would understand what was meant by the word “anatomy”. The modern Gray’s Anatomy opts for completeness and includes an introduction, but goes straight into important clarifications. But in the for Students edition, the reader apparently needs it explained to them that anatomy can help doctors diagnose diseases, and that correct interpretation of what they see in their patients’ bodies, rather than incorrect interpretation, would be a good thing.
Here’s the 1860 version describing joints:
The various bones of which the Skeleton consists are connected together at different parts of their surfaces, and such connection is designated by the name of Joint or Articulation. If the joint is immoveable, as between the cranial and most of the facial bones, their adjacent margins are applied in almost close contact, a thin layer of fibrous membrane, the sutural ligament, and, at the base of the skull, in certain situations, a thin layer of cartilage being interposed. Where slight movement is required, combined with great strength, the osseous surfaces are united by tough and elastic fibrocartilages, as in the joints of the spine, the sacro-iliac, and inter-pubic articulation; but in the moveable joints, the bones forming the articulation are generally expanded for greater convenience of mutual connexion, covered by an elastic structure, called cartilage, held together by strong bands or capsules, of fibrous tissue, called ligament, and lined by a membrane, the synovial membrane, which secretes a fluid that lubricates the various parts of which the joint is formed, so that the structures which enter into the formation of a joint are bone, cartilage, fibro-cartilage, ligament, and synovial membrane.
Clear. Trusts the reader to be able to read. It’s hard to find directly comparable passages with the 2020 Gray’s Anatomy for Students, but this is close enough:
The sites where two skeletal elements come together are termed joints. The two general categories of joints are those in which:
the skeletal elements are separated by a cavity (i.e., synovial joints), and
there is no cavity and the components are held together by connective tissue (i.e., solid joints) Blood vessels that cross over a joint and nerves that innervate muscles acting on a joint usually contribute articular branches to that joint…
There’s that bullet-point list again. Gray’s Anatomy for Students makes heavy use of bold keywords and bullet-point lists. These techniques make any text easier to understand — for the barely-literate.
Obviously Gray’s Anatomy for Students is the better medical textbook, having been written in the 21st-century. There was a lot we didn’t know about the body in 1860. Likewise, Etiquette, The Centennial Edition is probably more applicable in the 21st-century than the outmoded and gendered rules of the original edition. But while the quality of information has improved, the delivery has not (aside from the addition of images and diagrams to the medical texts). Authors now feel the need to talk down to university students like they’re idiots. What’s changed?
Literacy rates in the USA have risen from only 80% in 1870, to 99% today.[1] Literacy rates eventually became pointless to measure in America, because everyone could read at least a bit. Instead, they started measuring reading level in 1971. The reading level has barely budged since, increasing only slightly since the ’70s.[2]
If the average American has barely improved, what about the intellectual class? That is, those Americans who have at least attended some college?
Verbal/reading SAT scores of college-bound students have steadily decreased since the 1950s,[3] giving some indication that the average literacy of the intellectual class is dropping. Whether that’s because the same number of intellectuals are losing their ability to read complex texts, or because more people are entering the intellectual class, diluting the score, I don’t really care. The takeaway is that terms like “intellectual”, “college-educated”, or “expert” don’t mean what they used to, because the people these terms apply to increasingly cannot read.
To not seem like an elitist, I should say that I’m as much a victim of this effect as anyone else. I was raised on the same diet of picture-book textbooks and ChatGPT-tier hollow prose as every other academic student, and my literacy suffers as a result. Only recently am I making an effort to read things that are a little more challenging. Things written before the ’80s. Currently, I’m reading Style by F. L. Lucas. I also recently read Class by Paul Fussell, which was highly entertaining and a great place to start if you want to try out some pre-80s reading.
As a class, the real experts are still around, I think. But now they have the same titles and degrees as the countless “nouveau experts”, and so nobody can tell which experts are worth trusting. All we can do is develop our own literacy and do our thinking for ourselves.
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https://www.erikthered.com/tutor/historical-average-SAT-scores.pdf This table is a bit confusing if you just look at it. You have to know that SAT data was recentered in 1995 and again in 2016. It really does represent a continual decline, even though the scores suddenly jump up in 2017.
The more recent versions here just seem like better writing to me honestly. Short simple sentences which communicate a single idea are good.
If that makes them easy to read for the less literate, so much the better; they’re even easier to read for the more literate, no?
I am someone who loves long, complex sentences. The 19th century was peak prose style for me. The Gettysburg Address is a fantastic bit of writing. The fiction of that time can be a joy.
But this style is hard to do well. The Emily Post example given above is readable, though not unusually inspired. It moves through a series of examples and exceptions in a faintly herky-jerky way. But the prose is well-enough fit to Emily Post’s goal. She is trying to introduce many of her readers to the manners of a different social class, and her choice of vocabulary and syntax are part of that. Her readers wish to appear refined, and thus, some fancy words will please them.
Contrast this with Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique from 1835. This is often considered an unusually good example of aristiocratic prose, at least among the sort of people who write academic introductions:
If you don’t read French, look at the length of the sentences and the punctuation. There is a great degree of parallelism here, and a pleasing rhythm. You could, if you wished to be overly cute about it, reformat much of this writing as a series of bulleted lists. But if you diagrammed the sentences, the structure would be quite clean. Tocqueville is a masterful writer, and here he wishes to convey two things: his own impeccable elite credentials, and his sincere enthusiasm for the egalitarian nature of American society. His goal is to maximize genuine reform in France, while minimizing elite decapitations. This is a subject of immediate interest to his readers.
But for every Alexis de Tocqueville, I could find you a hundred or a thousand writers who wrote needlessly convoluted slop. Long sentences are hard to do well. They demand an almost clockwork precision to remain truly clear.
Today, 19th-century prose is out of fashion. Multiple factors drove this change, including the influence of writers like Hemingway, a frustration with hopelessly convoluted prose, and a growing impatience on the part of readers drowning in oceans of text. And, yes, a vast increase in the portion of the population with a college education. And of course we explain the basics more than we did, because we are increasingly conscious of a broad audience with many odd gaps in their knowledge. Every skipped step risks losing a reader who might have benefited from an author’s thoughts. And some of our readers may even speak English as a second or third language. Even if they are extremely well educated in their native tongue, they may not realize that the “anthropology” department teaches very different things in the US than it does in Europe.
The modern style can be done well, though doing it truly well still demands considerable skill. Perhaps more interestingly, the modern style usually fails more gracefully. Simple sentences and bulleted lists usually succeed in conveying the author’s main points, even if the author is a mediocre writer.
If this is true, I wonder if the advent of AI will lead to prose in books that doesn’t have to do this anymore, because the reader-otherwise-left-behind can just ask AI if they end up confused about something.
I wonder if you missed the other differences, like the constant explanation to the reader of things they must already know. There have been plenty of writers throughout history known for their brevity who did not waste it explaining the obvious. I don’t mind short, simple sentences, though as the book I’m currently reading [[1]] suggests, the “brevity of Seneca and Tacitus” can be “too artificially epigrammatic”, and too much concision risks “sail[ing] down to posterity in an armada of nutshells.” I think a little wordiness, a little complexity gives writing a bit of room to breathe. Don’t write Gordian Knot sentences, but I think a little complexity is okay and basically doesn’t risk confusing a literate reader.
Style, the Art of Writing Well by F. L. Lucas
Yeah, I agree that the modern version of Ettiquite is worse, but that’s just because we don’t have very complicated ettiquite! They need to waste space here, because everyone already knows what a handshake is, and you need at most a one-sentence description. If you didn’t turn every sentence into a paragraph the book would quickly turn into a blog post.
The solution is not in fact to add more flowery prose or complicated sentences, its to write about something else.
I also don’t know whether those reading in 1922 would say the same thing. We read the 1922 version and think “Oh wow! So informative!”, but perhaps the girls forced to read the book at a 1922 finishing school were thinking the same thing, or maybe ettiquite in 1922 was just a lot more complicated than it is today (it is).
Perhaps, similarly to the hypothetical bored girl in finishing school, in 100 years the future will look at the modern version and think “So informative!”.
I would certainly never suggest this. You seem to be implying that good prose is independent of useful prose, but it’s not. Good prose isn’t just flowery and fancy, it is respectful of the reader and their time, and delivers a message clearly and in an entertaining way.
It seems like you’re acknowledging the 2022 version is a bloated waste of space, while also suggesting at the same time that actually it’s very informative, and that this is all just relative? I definitely do not believe this is all just relative, or that girls forced to read Emily Post in the 1920s would have thought the writing in the book was hollow. It’s clearly full of useful information. Not to mention wit and charm. I weep for the future of our species if women in 2122 would think the 2022 version was “so informative!”
I guess my point is that the fact the 2022 version sucks is predicted on my model from the fact that we just don’t use too much complicated etiquette anymore. The fact the sentences are hollow is a fact more about the subject being written, not the skill of the author.
Concretely, using the Wikipedia page for modern handshaking in the US I think gives better prose than the modern 2022 version of the etiquette guide
Alternative theory is that in the past substantial part of the readers actually didn’t understand this complex prose, and modern authors are just better at being understood.
Everyone was just pretending to understand each other? Some kind of social signaling game? Is there a reason this seems plausible to you?
Hmm, I sometimes do math tutoring and my mother does it professionally. And we observe that very common barrier to solve word problems is to actually extract facts from the statement.
Also, I play quiz game where the questions are not just about erudition, but about connecting several facts about the answer. And when I show these questions to someone I often see that person don’t understand how the text of the question forces conditions on what answer can be.
In both cases they usually don’t understand that they don’t understand the text.
Great article—provides clear examples of a trend that we’ve all quietly suspected. There is, however, one thing that I think it misses:
In the American 1950′s (and in virtually every other country with a globally-respected education system today), college attendance was something for the top ten percent of the population. At present, 39 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds have a Bachelor’s degree, and nearly half have a degree of some kind.
While the dumbing-down of college can be somewhat ameliorated by the stratification of the college experience that we’ve seen (a State U degree used to be prestigious!), with ‘top-college education’ replacing ‘college education’ in our culture, in practice, it’s very hard to make a clean break, especially seeing as the U.S. education system is allergic to the idea that one person might ever be inextricably more qualified than another on the basis of their intelligence or natural work ethic. Proposals for a German—style path system, in which students that aren’t likely to thrive in higher education are directed towards careers they’re more likely to do well with, have been repeatedly shot down on this grounds.
Worth pointing out that high school has had a similar issue. NCLB made a lot of people feel better about themselves, but it essentially destroyed the last vestiges of rigor in the public school system. You can’t build a meaningful HS degree around the −2sd kid that isn’t allowed to wait a year and go over difficult material again, and is strongly discouraged from dropping out at 17 and getting an early start on his career (which would be significantly kinder for him—the extra money helps, and not everyone can learn Calculus).
Thanks! I definitely agree, and that’s what I was alluding to when I said more people were entering the intellectual class, possibly diluting its literacy. I learned about this from Paul Fussell’s book Class. He suggested the same number of people, around ten percent, are still going to real university, and the rest are essentially fakes.
I’m not sure what it’s like for American high schools, but in Alberta (Canada) we had different streams for different kids. Dash-1 courses were for academic stream kids, dash-2 was either non-academic or for someone who wants a college certificate or a trade, dash-3 focuses on employability, and dash-4 is for students with learning disabilities. There was also an extra distinction between normal dash-1 students and dash-1 students who were also taking the IB program, which is like AP. I’ve never thought about it, but I’ve never heard of anything like this in America, and I wonder if it’s common or not. It seems like a pretty good idea to keep different groups of students separate. Though I don’t really see a point of having the dash-2 and dash-3 students there at all. Let them join the workforce and make some money. It doesn’t matter how valuable you think the information is for them. They’re not paying attention anyway.
That’s an interesting position. It makes sense to me that that’s the number that’d have the qualifications to do so, but are they still getting the same quality of education today?
That’s a very common-sense system, seems like a gentler version of what Germany and Korea do. Unfortunately, the U.S. system doesn’t look anything like it. We have only one track, with differentiation delivered in theory through AP courses (advanced kids) and special education (kids with severe learning disabilities) courses. Unfortunately, the former are a constant political target, and the latter are constantly in the process of “mainstreaming” students that are unsuited to standard classes by dropping them into gen. ed.
I actually think that it is both predictable and also a merit to our society that doctors are dumber than they used to be. Following Whitehead’s precept that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them”, we’d ideally at once broaden the pool of potentially qualified medical practitioners and reduce the difficulty of succeeding at their profession.
If, in the future, any Homer Simpson can safely suture your wounds and chemotherapize your cancers, would you insist they had the reading skills of a medical student of the 1860s?
I don’t mind if Homer Simpson sutures my wounds, as long as there’s a pathway to me getting in front of a real brilliant person if I have a tricky health problem. The problems start when Homer Simpson starts thinking he’s brilliant and starts blaming you when he can’t figure out what’s wrong with you. And when you can’t tell him apart from the real brilliant people.
Alternate explanation: Anything worth reprinting with multiple editions and updates over the years is likely to have been first written by an inspired and gifted writer. Any given editor is likely to lack the same pizzazz as the original author, and so over the years, the life of the work is likely to ebb away.
If you want to find great writing, perhaps you’re more likely to find it in the great first edition novels of our time, rather than in 30th edition updated texts which, for all I know, sell more on name recognition than anything else.
I don’t fully buy this alternate explanation, because I find the same increase in literacy when I read older books that were not so popular even when they were published. I’ve even read some letters written by normal people in the ’70s, and they seemed to be shockingly literate for normal people.
That said, I’m sure the effect you’re pointing to is real, I just don’t think it’s the whole story.
Another possible thing that is going on is that older texts appear more posh and sophisticated because they use older vocab like “posh” that have fallen outside the mainstream. I wouldn’t put too much stock in this explanation (and it doesn’t directly relate to the stylistic changes you point out), but I do think older language is part of the appeal for me when I pick up an old book.
The evidence I am about to ask for may exist! However, I am still comfortable asking for it, as without it the whole thing falls apart, and I think this class of argument really always needs to show this explicitly: can you show that literally anyone reads the “modern Centennial Edition of Etiquette released in 2022?”
I don’t think it’s wildly popular, but it has around 500 reviews on the Canadian Amazon, which seems okay for a reference book, and is similar to the number of reviews for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I think they keep making new editions because it’s popular enough. I don’t know how to estimate more precisely than that.
I’ll grant that the quotations from the centennial Etiquette are simply horrendous, but apart from its prose defects it should be noted that we currently live in a society in which the concept of ‘good breeding’ has no proper equivalent (big loss imo), social skill is defined more by charm than class (mixed bag), and business etiquette has been elevated to a minimal cross-cultural norm of tolerance and non-offensiveness (big win). So we should in general expect a modern treatment of manners to be vaguer, and more people to read other sorts of books for social advice.
We should no longer consider people with degrees or affiliated with universities as being ‘intellectual’ in any way whatsoever because universities promote violence and refuse to improve their horrendous behavior.I am striking this out because it is better if I instead made only mathematics posts on this site relevant to AI safety.
This is certainly a popular bit of political propaganda at the moment, spread by the dominant political forces in 2025, with a goal of crushing our universities and of making them ideologically subservient to state power and state beliefs.
The reality on the ground is rather different. If you actually sit in the median university lecture, you will be extremely hard-pressed to find any professors promoting violence. Typically, you will find professors promoting the importance of differential equations, or if you lean towards the humanities, the joys of ancient Aegean art. If you search more deeply, every university can produce a handful of oddball radicals who argue for revolution (or counter-revolution) in the abstract. This has always been the case. Every university needs a few faculty cranks, if only to teach students to recognize the species and to check the course catalog more carefully in the future. (My alma mater had a notorious right-wing crank, and one very radical feminist, plus several more esoteric sorts of cranks.) You can also, of course, find a great many 19-year-olds who believe strange things, and who occasionally dream of revolutionizing society. But such is the nature of 19-year-olds who have recently discovered that society is frequently awful, but who have not yet realized quite how fragile civilization can be. But honestly, there is no dignity in 50-year-olds getting worked up about the fact that 19-year-olds have terrible ideas for reforming society.
But this does leave a more specific and pressing issue: the tolerance of mass-protest “encampments”, especially those with significant numbers of university outsiders. Typically, these protests are not especially popular among the student body as a whole. University administrators do not enjoy dealing with mass protests, and they are often quite bad it. They do realize that handling protests poorly often leads to larger protests, and they are reluctant to punish students for exercising their First Amendment rights to say awful things while waving signs. (This is true, in my experience, even when the people saying awful things are conservative. For a well-known US example, The Dartmouth Review was disliked by administrators for decades, but it was still permitted to litter copies all over campus.)
But at the same time, protests should never be allowed to threaten students or to disrupt the educational mission of the university. And yes, this has happened a number of times in recent years, and not every university dealt with it well. This was also true in the 60s; there were protests which nearly became angry mobs, and there were people dragged into Maoist “consciousness-raising” sessions, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.
Still, if you actually visit a university, walk around, and talk with the students, it is exceptionally hard to walk away with the impression that “universities promote violence.” You can, if you are determined enough, perhaps find a professor who promotes Marxist revolution in the abstract. And it isn’t hard to find administrators who’ve bungled a protest. But if you look at what universities do promote and teach on a day-to-day basis, you would really need to stretch to find “violence” even in the top 100.
I was a professor, so I know that universities promote violence, so don’t even try that bullshit on me. People hate universities because universities are absolutely horrendous and extremely unprofessional. Until universities apologize for their extremely low standards and horrible behavior, we should MOCK all people with degrees from universities and regard them as evil worthless people. People hate me for bringing this up because most people with college degrees are scumbags who are afraid to admit that they are far stupider (and more evil too) than people who did not waste their money and time in college.I DO NOT NEED TO VISIT A UNIVERSITY TO KNOW HOW IT IS LIKE SINCE I WAS A PROFESSOR, YOU BLOODTHIRSTY SCUMBAG!P.S. I knew people would downvote me. The reason people hate me for talking about this is that most people with college degrees are bloodthirsty piles garbage who need to be punished for their evil. You all probably think that barbaric practices like ECT are healthy because you just fucking trust medical professionals trained by universities along with all other university graduates. You all have the morals of Jeffrey Dahmer.I am striking this out because it is better if I instead made only mathematics posts on this site relevant to AI safety.
Ok… I mean, this is very obviously against our moderation guidelines. This is a warning. Do expect a pretty immediate ban if you write more like this.
I just wrote a comment defending sneering recently on LessWrong, and I think this is a good time to put my beliefs into action.
You may feel smart, but your comment does not convey any of that intelligence, if you have it. You may be very confident in your opinions, but you are doing nothing to confer that confidence to anyone else. If you want me to believe what you believe, you’ll have to be convincing. A digital temper tantrum won’t do it.
This is fascinating- I’ve been a fan of Joseph’s youtube channel for years, but I’ve never seen him comment on lesswrong. A while ago in that setting, we got into a back and forth about eigenvalues of anti-linear operators, which was object level fascinating, but also ended up requiring both Joseph and me to notice that we were wrong, which we did with little difficulty. What I’m trying to say is that Joseph is actually smart and open minded on technical questions, but is also definitely not respecting community norms here. If we can successfully not scare him off while discouraging quite this level of vitriol, there is definitely potential for him to contribute.
Thanks for the context.
You are siding with evil because you yourself are evil. My anger against people like you is righteous. If you are not convinced, it is simply because you have been completely consumed by your own evil. Universities promote violence. I know. I was a professor. But you just want me to be violently attacked and injured or killed.UNIVERSITIES MUST BE REJECTED FOR PROMOTING VIOLENCE!P.S. Only commenting and responding to my non-technical posts where I call out universities for their problem just proves my point. Face it. You are stupid, and universities only pretended to educate you.I am striking this out because it is better if I instead made only mathematics posts on this site relevant to AI safety.