In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.

What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.

As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.

Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.

For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.

> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much

It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments

Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.

Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.

Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.

Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.

Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.

My stab at it: Looks like about 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026. The US population is about 350 million.

20% of 350 million is 70 million, so 70 million people couldn't paraphrase in 2017. 30% is 105 million, so 105 million people couldn't in 2026. That means that of the 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026, only one million of them could paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text?

I know the US educational system is a mess, but I find it hard to believe that it's quite that much of a mess. Can anyone point out flaws in the math?

We often judge those changes but we are notoriously bad at consciously predicting the future our collective unconscious often does.

> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.

(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)

Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.

For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.

One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).

Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."

I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.

In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.

It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.

The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.

I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.

It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.

> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.

English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)

The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.

> The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.

You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:

  I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.

The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.

Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.

Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp

I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.