The Saucy Wave Equation

29 ~ Academic Researcher in Germany

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

oooooh my god conference organizing is getting busier bc we're a month out, and i'm now delegating more stuff to committee members and. good lord. people are incompetent. like two people keep emailing entirely the wrong people for things and fucking up out schedule as a result.

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

working on my academic CV for an award that I'm applying for and they're asking for just 4 pages. which seems long for a usual CV. but as a (successful) academic it's very much like :/ how do I fit a full publication and conference talk list on here with all my awards! and service and outreach!!

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

I always feel so mixed about how to answer questions from coworkers like “how do you write this/do research so quickly?” And like. The right answer is NOT “I’m just that good” even when it’s true…

[existennialmemes]

They should invent a kind of burnout, where after you reach your limit of existential exhaustion for the third time, your health bar doubles and you transform into a bigger, stronger iteration of yourself. Like you're a nintendo boss in the final boss battle.

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

it's always interesting re-reviewing a paper because I can really see the differences in how people respond to feedback. for one paper, I commented that the way the paper was structured made it actively more difficult to understand and suggested some reorganization, and the author just flat out refused to do it, just making some minor changes here and there. Like, I get that re-structuring a paper is a lot of work. But if you want people to really understand the implications of your work, you have to present it well!! Sorry!!! Science communicated poorly is science that might as well not have been done

[screambirdscreaming]

Genuinely I think the great unsolved academic problem of the century is accessibility of knowledge structures.

It's been true for a long time that the academic project has accumulated more information than any person can readily comprehend the scope of, so if you want to learn something the immediate challenge is figuring out what is already known about it, and where to find it. Library science is structured around this problem, and has some interesting approaches and answers! Mostly following a sort of decision-tree model, where the organizational categories are necessarily somewhat arbitrary, the important thing is that they're clearly defined enough that you can ask a series of questions about "it is this or that?" and arrive at a location.

But the set of arbitrary categories does unavoidably influence the way knowledge is generated and interpreted, the "silo effect" of different fields of study not knowing how to talk to each other about their areas of overlap, and not necessarily even thinking to check what areas of overlap exist and who they could and should be talking to.

And hypothetically digitization provides the potential to completely change this up! You can build database structures that can be filtered by many different criteria simultaneously! You can look for certain keywords wherever they appear regardless of category!

But then you face a whole new conceptual headache, which is figuring out how to categorize things in a parallel access structure. And you quickly have to contend with the fact that different fields are often using completely different words and conceptual approaches, and how do you link these things up across the database? How do you provide relevant context for what kind of background framework is in play, for someone coming in with an unknown level of background knowledge in potentially a completely different approach?

And then - this is where I get unclear on the historical timeline. For some reason, from the early digitization grappling projects to the internet I grew up on, something happened where the internet got very full of surface-level answers, and also extremely technical answers, but there's a huge slice missing in between, which is SPECIFICALLY the college level "introduction to how this field is thought about, including slightly more than surface information but also an orientation to the framework of thought which has been built in academia so far, and which will be useful for knowing how to find and interpret more technical information on this subject." This type of thing is INFURIATINGLY difficult to find on the internet, and has been even since back when google worked. There's a handful out there of thoughtfully curated websites - usually hosted by some university where someone took the trouble to build out an explainer for their field of study - but they've always been random lucky unicorns to find. As a fallback you can try downloading some random textbooks and reading them, but I can't call that a good approach.

And then, in parallel to that, there's the search engine thing. Google early on hit a really interesting and compelling strategy for sorting webpages by their relationship to a web of knowledge - but the proxy for this was a web of links, which rapidly became Extremely gameable. For a while they were on top of managing this, somehow, I don't actually know the technical details.

There was a brief window where search expanded from just including your exact keywords, to triangulating sets of concepts related to your keywords - this was like 2015? There was a fleeting moment where a search of several meaty keywords could actually tell you what the field of study you wanted was, could point you to things slightly beyond the scope of what you'd asked for, which was so cool. And then fairly rapidly over several years this collapsed into showing you instead things that were related to vaguer, less technical versions of your keywords, and then eventually to the point where if you had more than about 3 keywords it would just start ignoring most of them.

This seems to have happened in parallel to a hard turn towards microadvertising and to google itself as an ad service. I have a suspicion that google stopped TRYING to get ahead of the gaming of their searches and instead just leaned into it, because this brought them more add revenue via content aggregators who ran their ads and also gamed their searches aggressively. Resulting in the rapid search engine sloptimization of everything.

Meanwhile database structural approaches really lagged, because search was so easy and powerful through google for a while, that straight keyword searching felt clunky and high-effort in comparison. There could have been a lot of work in this field that just... failed to materialize, as far as I can see.

Instead the data science world leaned in hard on machine learning - which could offer some interesting approaches! I think not unrelated to what 2010s google was up to actually! - but then all that got swept up in the push to natural language models. Which is INCREDIBLY frustrating, because the output you're going to get from a language model for a search query is AT BEST equivalent to asking some guy who's read approximately everything ever to summarize of the top of its head. In practice it's worse than this, because a language model does not actually have a conceptual understanding of what it's read, a fact which is only semi-compensated by the sheer volume of information it's processed - if a clear conceptual approach is strong enough in it's text sources it's statistically likely to cough that back out, but that's entirely a gamble. But even aside from that, this completely fails as an indexing strategy because it can't send you anywhere! It can't tell you where it got anything! It's a total dead end on the project of organizing and accessing the body of knowledge which exists!

So we're back at a square where the options for sorting and accessing digitized knowledge at large are not really better than they were in 2002. And there's an absolute mire of paywall inaccessibility tied around basically everything that has enough source reputability to separate it from the absolutely unfathomable quantities of bullshit that's been created in the SEO arms race. And the academic field that seems like it SHOULD have been working on this project, the whole time, has been.... genuinely I don't FUCKING know why and how they lost the plot so completely. And the other academic field that previously approached the problem has been underfunded into obscurity because "computers made them irrelevant".

[memeuplift]

[earhartsease]

on it boss

[leontocephagaina]

"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

Opinion | My Students Can’t Read

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

[bowditch]

I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

i just got my first official invited talk invitation that wasn't redirected from one of my supervisors!

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[youngadultread]

“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

(via iamayoungfeminist)

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

Aaah I always forget how fun a conference is when I’m tired and overwhelmed before lol it’s been just half a day and I’m already feeling so inspired and so happy by the positive feedback from a new community this time 🥰🥰🥰

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

I used to be sooooo judgey in my head about profs making slides etc right before a conference. And now. Alas. I find myself in the same position.

(What they don’t tell you is that when you’ve given some form of the talk before putting the slides together is pretty trivial and is absolutely a task that can be done on the plane/train there)

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

it feels really nice to go give a collaborator* (*actually previous supervisor) a quick update on work and have him (a) start off with his response to me saying "yeah I've made a lot of progress" "uh yeah I would expect nothing less" and (b) basically say "damn okay write this paper already. i know I don't have to worry about you writing and publishing papers"

like teehee I'm doing so well at being an academic it's nice. And it's nice to have a mathematician tell me that i'm doing crazy cool applied mathematics that is beyond him. it's good for my ego!

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

I wish I could say *why* the typical somewhat obsequious response to reviewers in a paper I’m re-reviewing irritates me especially when they’re fawning over the comments that *I* made. But yet. It remains a mystery.

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

OH ITS BECAUSE ITS HOW CHATGPT TALKS

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

I wish I could say *why* the typical somewhat obsequious response to reviewers in a paper I’m re-reviewing irritates me especially when they’re fawning over the comments that *I* made. But yet. It remains a mystery.