• 0 Posts
  • 514 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 18th, 2024

help-circle











  • The difference is that they can boil the frog gradually.

    Traditional media tries to move people, absolutely. But a newspaper has to address the crazies and try to convert people into crazies in the same paper. If they’re too extreme, more moderate people can see that right away, and it’s easier to minimize engagement with it.

    With social media, you personalize the content surfaced. You start by making it seem mostly sane, with an out there idea here or there. Then, as they start to engage with the slightly mild stuff, you move the “mostly sane” in that direction, and the “mild” moves a couple extra steps. Now, you’re part of a movement. Everyone around you is changing their beliefs, and the new ones aren’t that far off from your previous beliefs, so why not follow?

    6 months later, you were always pretty left/right-leaning (cognitive dissonance, baybee!!!). But it looks like the consensus is finally shifting your way. It’s just a small step further right/left, and everyone around you is making it too. The world is changing for a better, so let’s be that change.





  • Fair warning: This is complete nonsense:

    When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn’t believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

    “Word recognition is a preoccupation,” he said. “I don’t teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that.”

    He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word “horse” and says “pony” instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

    I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn’t the same thing as a horse. Second, don’t you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says “pony”? And different letters say “horse”?

    He dismissed my question.

    “The purpose is not to learn words,” he said. “The purpose is to make sense.”

    Cognitive scientists don’t dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can’t accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

    Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn’t like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

    “My science is different,” Goodman said.

    This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It’s important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there’s decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.