29th
May
2012
Obfuscation
posted in education |
This is not a test. Do you understand everything you read? I enjoy reading, and I do make an effort to “catch the drift” intended by the author. Sometimes, I just can’t catch it… the following text is copied from a news article, so I’m calling fair use.
‘For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions. Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.’
And now, here’s a “readability analysis”. Teachers are trained to do this sort of thing, in case you are wondering…
| Number of characters (without spaces) : | 989.00 |
| Number of words : | 177.00 |
| Number of sentences : | 5.00 |
| Average number of characters per word : | 5.59 |
| Average number of syllables per word : | 1.86 |
| Average number of words per sentence: | 35.40 |
| Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading | |
| Gunning Fog index : | 24.10 |
SMOG :19.97
| Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text : | ||
| Coleman Liau index : | 16.26 | |
| Flesch Kincaid Grade level : | 20.22 | |
| ARI (Automated Readability Index) : | 22.59 |
| Flesch Reading Ease : | 13.18 |
For anyone still with me, the conclusion is that the writer did not read his or her text. As a result, neither will anyone else.
