. . . .not just "garbage" in providing minimal information but also in the poster's seeming inability to string coherent thoughts together. Then I came across this from the NYT:
***"After years of studying how human beings write, the cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting.
Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else — as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest.
Very few people would volunteer to dig a ditch. Likewise, it is hard — almost impossible, many English teachers will admit — to turn a reluctant writer into an enthusiastic one."***
The Founder's new "preview" feature is a great new addition but I suspect that few posters (myself included) actually preview their work before posting.
So -- my take away is that while going to a strip club might be "hard", writing intelligently about one's visit post hoc is arguably harder! LOL! What do other's think?
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The follow up NYT article is about “cognitive paralysis” exacerbated by AI. People (primarily students) are relying on AI for the simplest writing tasks, and as a result are losing the ability to form complete and coherent thoughts and arguments.
@Iknowbetter Yes, that's the article I was reading. But the intro to this article made me think about this site and the "garbage" reviews and writing that frequently exist here. The whole AI aspect is also fascinating but not the focus of this particular discussion.
I work with people between the ages of 16 and 30 every day. When I want intellectual stimulation I talk to a potato.
@skibum609 I take it that the 16-30 year olds with whom you work are NOT very intellectually stimulating. . . . I guess for me, many of the young people I work with ARE intellectually stimulating but a large percentage of them can't write very coherently.
I read supposedly finished product by people with advanced degrees all the time where it is apparent that the writers are incapable of composing and stringing together two coherent sentences. Since they don't have basic grammar down, it is inconceivable that they could ever write an organized argument/exposition/explanation. And this is all from people who have been in the professional workforce long before the advent of ChatGPT. Now, there is no compulsion to learn how to organize thoughts and set them forth coherently. Just submit a close-enough prompt, a let the robots do the work, and call it a day. AI will teach itself to mimic idiomatic prose and we'll all grow to accept it, but we'll be saddled with a generationally inability to express complex thoughts
.. because too many adjudicators approve the garbage.
@minnow It's obvious that some of the adjudicators don't even read the reviews before they approve them. And the comments we may write afterwards, calling them out, will never be seen by the bad adjudicator. That's because they approve reviews for clubs they never even heard of before, and will never go back to after it's published. They wouldn't even remember the name of the club.
I've always been reasonably competent writer, but what helped me immensely were adult-ed writing courses I took a few decades ago. Because of my specific interests, the subjects were travel, and also movies, but probably any focus would have had the same effect. Synthesizing those skills with what I had already mastered in technical documentation was just the ticket. I am frequently amazed by the writing facility of some of the PLs here. Some of you have an unmistakable personal style along with the ability to keep the reader engaged. You're as good as many professional writers.
@loper Considering that disposable cash is a requirement to enjoy this hobby responsibly (don't want to be ransacking the retirement or college funds), I'm not surprised that many members are good writers. High earners are not automatically good writers, but there is at least some rough correlation between intelligence and income level, and also a correlation between intelligence and writing skill.
Only requiring 4 adjudicators pushes reviews out faster... but at what cost?
@PAWG_Patrol It couldn't hurt, but I'm wondering how many 4-3 photo finishes there are now
@PAWG_Patrol True (unless you're Henry Miller)
@PAWG_Patrol I do think, though, that one thing this decade has taught us is that super high earners are sometimes super stupid and illiterate people.
I once worked for a guy in the 1980's whose father told me that his son could write using a word processing program, but he would have to keep editing it before he was done. He said he had always used a typewriter, which meant he had to think about what he was going to write first. He said he was faster and better than his son because of it. The same is true for math. How many people can still multiply and divide long hand, much less take the square root of a number or use a slide rule?
Nobody writes like me, okay? I write the best reviews, everybody says so. Big, beautiful words. But these other reviews? Total disaster! Complete garbage! They don't preview their work, they don't have the stamina. Writing is hard—very taxing, like digging a ditch, maybe harder! The English teachers agree with me, okay? And now they use the AI, the robots, because they're lazy and they don't want to think. Very sad! We have high earners, smart people on this site, but the adjudicators—who are these people? Total losers, they don't even read the reviews! We need to make TUSCL great again, folks, believe me!
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
@ilbbaicnl Thank you for striving to make TUSCL great again!
@lurkingdog The credit goes to Google AI.
I base my approval of a pending review based on entertainment and/or information. I myself admit I am a poor writer. I just don't have that many cooperating brain cells. And Siri/Alexa sometimes mess up what I originally dictate.
@Jascoi Siri and Alexa are probably just jealous. You spend all that time and money on real, live, flesh-and-blood women, and you just leave them at home. Geez.
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