The lack of books and therefore lack of reading leads to reduce vocabulary. I read somewhere the average of known words by an Arabic speaker was substantially lower than English speakers.
When I switch to speaking Arabic (poorly) I struggle to find words because my vocab level is so bad. Imagine for an every day person, not being able to effectively express themselves. It would lead to a ton of frustration, miscommunication and misunderstanding.
To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.
I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.
I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness.
I have a theory that Aphantasia is the symptom of something else, and this other thing relates to how the brain of such individuals stores information. I think it's stored in a more "compressed" state.
As an example, I find myself remembering where info is and not what the info acrually was.
Humans are not homogeneous. I think this is a huge evolutionary advantage, different mental modes improved our survivability.
But of course in modern day life such "divergence" can lead to pathology.
I have Aphantasia, as well as excellent map reading skills and spatial awareness. BUT I'm pretty sure that spatial awareness is something I developed when cheffing (needing to know where things were rapidly) and map reading I attribute to video games (specifically doom originally haha).
> I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness.
Aphantasia is usually associated with spatial memory difficulties [1].
Anecdotal, but I am aphantasic (almost zero visualisation) and also have low spatial awareness (can't navigate without a map or GPS). I have no issues with driving or map reading, though.
In contrast, someone I know can almost perfectly visualise things mentally, but they struggle with reading maps. They can also navigate perfectly without requiring assistance.
No, the problem is they're still really dumb, and lack the ability to make logical connections that are obvious to us. "should I walk or drive to the carwash" being a very recent example of the larger problem.
The old web was local forum created by gamers for gamers who hosted real life events. You could post asking for super specific advice to your locale. It was eaten by reddit.
There were cool IRC servers for all sorts of niche projects and topics. This still exists of course but a lot of it was eaten by Discord or Slack.
While I never participated, sites like LiveJournal provided both a unique outlet and view into other people's lives. I think a lot of social media like Instagram and Facebook eat this up.
I'm sure everyone has their own versions. And this is the old web that was gobbled up by mega sites which aim to commericalise the crap out of everything.
Oh my gosh I loved Diaryland, and how you could customize your shit with some simple HTML, but I think they went through enshittification while they were still around anyway
But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?
Did they? I think it was LiveJournal that enshittified. Diaryland is actually still around. I just checked it out and it now "Diaryland v2!" I actually last checked it out in the past year and it still looked exactly like it did back then!
Well there you go: The "old web" is still here or can be, but most of the people complaining about the "new web" don't really care about it anymore, they just pretend to
I guess that's what I was getting at, I think that (as usual) there is more nuance here past "people pretending to care" (which I think is extremely uncharitable, btw).
Back then there was a forcing factor to making your own website. Not just personal sites, but bands, artists, interest groups, etc. Now everyone just uses facebook because (or whatever) because it's easy and everyone is there. Even during the transition was better as myspace allowed you to customize the crap out of it with CSS and, as we were just discussing, DiaryLand gave you full access to do almost whatever you wanted (in the confines of static pages).
It has a LOT to do with billion dollar companies throwing their weight around and influencing politics. Tom never did that shit! (although given time, who knows... he did sell out).
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