Comment by pixl97

2 hours ago

>General society being generally poor communicators

period dot.

Don't insinuate there was a golden past where humans in general were great communicators, it didn't exist. Furthermore the need to communicate in the modern world has increased network sizes many times over what humans developed in the 'monkeysphere'. For all most of all human evolution the number of people you interacted with and communicated with was relatively tiny, like 150 or so.

Before we developed radio communication to crowds was a rare thing done by few people. Radio itself lead to massive crowds but few communicators themselves (Propagandists quickly realized its power for example). And really TV was much the same. But in the last 40 years we've had a geometric explosion in the ability to communicate by the average person. In terms of societal growth, this is a tiny sliver of time. Now your 'average idiot' can communicate with the world, poorly, and still garner a huge audience, and or work requires much less 'doing things' and communicating.

Nowhere do I claim that such a "golden past" existed. I am saying that the critical skill of communication to convey information, to gain information, to learn via one-to-one communications is rapidly being lost. It is not respected by education, it is not taught, and it is truly one of humanity's greatest skills: conveying understanding. Which has the side benefit of teaching one one how to identify illogical speech.