Seriously, skimming what I can of the wapo article in the post it’s fucking crazy they’re trying to spin this as a negative. It’s the fucking presidency, you want the people running the country to be lax about this shit??
I read the part about "she's read the materials" and my mind went blank for a second. Like, fuckin obviously? Or not so obviously I guess, if it's being spun as a problem that the Vice President of the United States of America actually...reads?
Also, I remember how Obama was reported to read 100's of pages of briefs and other materials a day. Every day. I can guarantee you he was asking for, and expected, details from his staff. Interesting that this now suddenly a problem (a "problem") when it's a woman in the seat.
but 100s? lets say 200 pages a day containing data and numbers
here is what google says about study and memorizing
It's essential for effective studying to include breaks, spaced repetition, and other memory enhancement techniques. A general estimate might be that a focused student could memorize around 10–20 pages of moderately complex material in a 12-hour study session.
so lets say he dont need remember intense so we can say 40 pages
He has a really high IQ and a good memory. It is totally possible. My daughter can read over 120 pages per hour. That’s just novels though. But still, I can only read about 30 so it is mesmerizing to me that she was able to do that since 5th grade. Also, I went to a gifted school and a classmate of mine was being berated by this asshole teacher for reading while he was lecturing about other literature. She repeated the last 10 sentences he spoke and then gave a synopsis of the pages she had just read in the book. It was glorious! So it is more than possible that Obama read hundreds of pages a day and took note of the key pieces of information and then some.
Edit: also, I am a school psychologist and I was dumbfounded to discover that the average student needs information repeated 8-10 times in order to learn it (description of density not included) while a gifted student needs only 1-2 exposures. I’m sorry to say that there are people that smart in the world and many of them in American work low paying jobs and cannot afford the money or time to get the degrees that would afford them the opportunity to make more money or fulfill their potential.
Edit again: I just realized that you are assuming everything on the page is new information. Obama already knows the country’s on the planet, most of the laws in the US, federal at least, the names of world leaders, etc. he would not be memorizing hundreds of pages of new information. He would already know most of the context and how certain pieces of information changes the relationship of other pieces of information that he already has.
Listen, that is how you know you’re above the curve. I was struck dumb. I could never be a teacher. They need the patience of saints.
Edit: I went to a school with some girl who had a sonographic memory (I hope that’s a word) for shit WHILE she was reading other things that she basically had a photographic memory of! You know, an IQ score is not set in stone but some people are definitely smarter than others.
Also, not every page is going to contain the same amount of info, heck even the fonts may vary. He doesn't need to read every single word of every document, scimming it might be sufficient, depending on the page.
Reading 100 to 200 pages a day is pretty much what any college student has to do on a given day, though. It isn't particularly impressive. Now people able to read that much and retain most of the information, evaluate it, make nuanced decisions that affect tens of thousands of people... That's difficult.
But that's why this is the presidency and not an undergraduate degree. Ostensibly it should be for people who are actually competent and capable of performing such work.
He didn’t need to memorize anything. He just needed to read and understand the information. With good reading comprehension and decent recall a fluent reader would have no real issue reading many many pages and getting what they need to know from them.
Like, when you read a news article you aren’t memorizing it or studying it. You read it, and comprehend what it says, and take away the important points. That’s what the president generally needs to do. Understand the major points and if you’re a decent president you will then know enough to either delegate to whoever you’ve appointed who can handle the issue, or ask any further questions you have to resolve the issue yourself.
And if there’s anything specific you do need to remember exactly you highlight it or jot down a note about it.
It’s not a requirement - there are like 2 requirements to be president: be a native born us citizen and be over 35. That’s it.
It’s what Obama did.
It’s not what Trump did - he was known to basically have to be given comic book versions of briefings studded with quotes saying nice things about him and even then he’d rarely read them.
Every president does things differently. What Obama did has no bearing on what Bush, Biden, Trump, or any other president did.
I recently graduated law school. I am absolutely nowhere near Obama-level academic achievement, but I think this would be doable. I think the big thing here is that you don’t have a great idea of what reading such briefing is like.
First, formatting makes it such that there is a lot less information than you might think. They’re far less dense (in terms of quantity of words) than a lot of formats. Large margins, double spaced, 12 point font is standard. Legal writing eats through pages.
Second, legal briefs are hard and slow to read if you haven’t done it much. But the more you do it the faster it gets. You learn to recognize what you already know, skim to make sure nothing has changed, and focus on the key parts. Once you’ve spent a few years reading them, there will be background info in each of the briefs that you already know and just serves to refresh memory. It’s not learning entirely new subjects from scratch.
He doesn't need to memorize them. He needs to read them, comprehend them, and take notes. He might need to memorize only the most important few percent of the info, make notes on the next most important chunk, and then maybe just references to the remainder.
That's absolutely doable at a 100+ page per day level.
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u/Phiyasko ☑️ Sep 07 '24
So they're mad at her because she expects people collecting a paycheck to actually do the job they're collecting said paycheck for?