JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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David made an interesting comment yesterday (not that he doesn’t on other days)
“If you ever wondered why Australians vote the way they do (vote for Lib/Lab/Teal/Green), an alarming number are functionally illiterate.
The dumbing-down of Australia by Leftist infiltration of the education system is almost complete.
Surely this is an argument against compulsory voting?
Grok AI gives the following analysis using ABS data among others.
Around 44% of Australian adults are considered functionally illiterate.”
I take it to mean that is as regards the written word and all that implies. I guess many Western nations will have similar figures. However more worrying is that I suspect a higher proportion than that are numerically illiterate. This matters a great deal of course as regards managing their finances, especially banking. Over here we are being pushed online for all things banking related and many people seem to want to do complex transactions using the tiny screens of their smartphones. That will surely backfire when they have no proper grasp of figures and a friendly banker isn’t sitting in front of them.
Even worse of course when it relates to politicians dealing with huge budgets. We have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who lives at 11 Downing Street, and is responsible for setting budgets, allocating finance, setting taxes etc. Most have no financial background whatsoever and the way in which they freely spend our money makes me suspect they are numerically illiterate and dont know the difference between millions and billions.
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The link title says it all regarding digital data. The EU seem to be following along similar lines following a proposal rammed through the EU parliament when most MEP’s had left for the summer break, so could not veto it in sufficient numbers.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-plans-secret-home-raids-and-teenage-informants/
I wonder if AI could read Orwell’s 1984 and come up with a version for modern times”2028″?
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