JonoMar 26
Imagine building a whole business on saying "yeah reading level is just the length of words and sentences, you can just average that over a whole text".
Like how the hell are you saying Hemingway is sometimes below Charlotte's Web, but also just above Twilight? Maybe impressive for 1988 when serious compute power is nowhere, but today it shouldn't be a paid API
Show thread Kale 
@jon_dog Lexile, eh?
Mar 26 at 3:02pmTusky
Show thread Kale Mar 26
@jon_dog haha, hadn't looked at the image. Yeah, I had copilot make me a script for... Basically this. It's a nice thing to add to a prompt like 'write me a training example for pretrain, lexile 800' or whatever
Show threadJonoMar 26

@DarkestKale Reading levels have their uses, MetaMetrics' original Lexile system just seems too simplistic.

A weird thing I stumbled on was "the most common trigrams from textbooks" and look at all "the United States" and "unit unit unit" https://hub.lexile.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/21stCenturyPhraseListA11y.pdf

Ultimately they make bank off of selling this system as a technofix to state education departments wanting a no hassle objective measure of reading ability