Deep skepticism and epistemic throughness doesn't lead you to sexy questions. It leads you to strange questions.

Example: What is the real literacy rate of Western societies?

Officially 95%+.

But might there be reading-like behaviours that can fool school and sophists.

Yes.

— Samo Burja (@SamoBurja) August 1, 2019

I’ve had a very similar thought before. Officially, everyone I went to high school with was literate. However, many of them couldn’t really parse anything but the simplest of texts and any more advanced literature was beyond them. I include most of the students in the honors classes and many in the so-called “gifted” classes in this assessment.

Were these people really literate? By some minimum standard, yes. But nearly all of their reading behaviors evinced no deep understanding but were rather a sort of call and response to stimuli enacted by their teachers and parents. I think this is true for most (~95%) of adults, too, to be clear. Thus, by a standard that judges literacy as any sort of deep comprehension or larger understanding, most people are functionally illiterate.

If you think that is unfair, remember how susceptible to propaganda nearly everyone is, and how even the simplest obvious things like climate change have caused so much societal misconstrual and incomprehension.