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Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
I think the specific is that 40% of adult Americans can't read at a seventh grade level.
Probably because they stopped teaching etymology in schools, So now many Americans do not know how to break a word down into its subjugate parts.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics
Specifically it is about 75% of the population being functionally or clinically illiterate as I said. This is more likely caused by the fact that American culture is anti intellectual, and not the lack of being taught etymology, as etymology has little to do with literacy.
Does that even actually help in English lmao
Better than entomology, which just bugs me.
Yes, English is absolutely full of words that can be deciphered from their roots.
I'd be curious, it seems more common in Latin based languages, whereas English seems to be a lot more... Free form?
There is an etymology word joke that says something along the lines of, "if "pro" is the opposite of "con", then is the opposite of "congress" "progress"?"
And if you don't know etymology, then that seems to make sense.
When you break down the word Congress, you get the prefix con and the root word gress, con means with, and gress means step, so it means to step with or to walk with.
The opposite of walking with someone is to walk apart from someone, so, the actual opposite of congress would be digress, and the opposite of progress would be regress.
Etymology is great at ruining jokes, but it's also great at helping you understand what words mean and why they mean them.
How about transgress.
The word trans means across, or on the other side, and gress once again would mean step, so to transgress is basically to cross the line, right?
I did a quick search, but there isn't really a word to describe the people that don't cross the line.
The opposite of the prefix trans is the prefix cis, which means "on the same side"
con is with, di apart, both in the "is apart" and "drifts apart" way, also "between" and "not", and trans is, well, also apart, but implying some sense of border, not just (conceptual) distance. I'd say that digress and transgress are comparatively synonym (if you squint in just the right way) and both antonym to congress.
intragress might be an alternative to the missing cisgress, especially as ingress already exists. And then we could have extragress for being not on the inside but not beyond the pale, either.
Or we could stop this silliness and cast out the Normans.
English is a mish-mash hodgepodge of two dozen other languages, many (most?) of which are Romantic/Latin-based.
According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was "level 2". 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were "non-starters", unable to complete the questionnaire.
For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics