[HN Gopher] In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era o...
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In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of
Epistemological Collapse
Author : bertman
Score : 278 points
Date : 2024-11-28 09:23 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| yawpitch wrote:
| The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a
| website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is
| kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked the link.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| I went and checked the page in another browser with my
| adblocker off. Wow. Just wow. I started using ad blockers on
| everything a few years ago because they became a little too
| annoying. I somehow missed when the web became nigh unusable
| from them.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| I disabled brave shields for a moment and wow. Especially the
| youtube-like iframe that slid in from the right. Crazy.
| llm_trw wrote:
| The irony is that even the ads on the site are so terrible they
| take a good 30 seconds to fully load.
|
| When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like
| it did with an adblocker on, but eventually:
| https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm
| tim333 wrote:
| Oh gosh you are right. I turned off the adblocker to check it
| out. I often kind of forget the adblock-less world is out
| there.
| hayleyest wrote:
| The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes,
| that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar.
| Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and
| obscure reference will do.
| Veen wrote:
| Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and
| elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic
| information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an
| occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in
| possibilities of English prose.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| Which of those references are obscure?
| the-smug-one wrote:
| I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the
| audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers:
| git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)
| cess11 wrote:
| It's for people that read books and have done so for a long
| time. That's all it takes to appreciate it, you really don't
| need to be a scholar.
| mathgeek wrote:
| I can't help but imagine some of the folks this message is
| referring to as "needing to read more" seeing this and
| dismissing it as using language of "the elites". There's a
| certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.
| ryandv wrote:
| I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and
| vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language.
| Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most
| escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to
| revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a
| higher standard in a piece about literature and written media
| and books.
|
| Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much
| characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where
| long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and
| Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving
| its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and
| perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the
| character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade
| of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue
| lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before
| your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed,
| or notification sitting in your dock.
|
| Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be
| dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and
| it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the
| walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I put random paragraphs into a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
| assessment calculator, which suggests the US school grade level
| required to understand the assessed text. It consistently
| returned between Grade 8 and 9.
| tim333 wrote:
| Also it's kind of hard to find definite statements to agree or
| disagree with. I mean it's all like "the arc of the moral
| universe had turned in part because of the supposedly
| liberatory power of technology". What does that actually mean?
| What is the arc of the moral universe? Which way did it turn? I
| wasn't aware it actually had an arc.
| bux93 wrote:
| It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media
| is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their
| information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The
| more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the
| premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes
| you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
| ndjdjddjsjj wrote:
| Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse
| is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change
| the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
| mihaic wrote:
| If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is
| simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on
| the population when everything in society works against them,
| it's not productive in any way.
| nverno wrote:
| > you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do
| drugs, duh"
|
| But that is obviously the solution at the individual level,
| and it is always productive to put the burden of solving
| your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
| pjc50 wrote:
| But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs
| doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do,
| and the same goes for people who consume poisoned
| information sources.
| nverno wrote:
| I mean, it's both right? It's easier to work on fixing
| policy if you're not a drug addict reading poisoned info.
| mihaic wrote:
| Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think
| the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so
| that putting the burden on the individual is made
| manageable.
|
| To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle,
| you need to create recycling stations in their area, and
| not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a
| plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the
| government unfortunately in some part.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The individual solution is insufficient in this case.
| Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the
| level of population statistics, it means there's a
| systemic cause that's stronger than most people's
| willpower.
| ndjdjddjsjj wrote:
| My main point is there isn't some Illuminati with access to
| good info you can't get for free.
|
| In the drug analogy I am saying most addicts _know_ about
| rehab. The conspiricy isn 't hiding all the NA groups.
| exceptione wrote:
| You would have a better main point when you started to
| question how this accident could happen:
| Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that
| by accident does everything to not talk about subjects
| that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they
| would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business
| partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of
| bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big
| picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive,
| emotionial pulp of no relevance.
|
| The problem is: we are naturally attracted to junk that
| tickles are emotional belief systems, for example some
| ideas we have about immigrants. It takes active THINKING
| to go against your gut feeling.
|
| How do you do that when you 1. were never
| taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest
| held memes 2. were brainwashed by endless
| affirmation via infotainment 3. are living in an
| infotainment environment were half of your countrymen
| believe things like "the election was stolen"?
|
| You are proposing to bank on _someone already deeply
| burdened by debt_.
| blackoil wrote:
| Society is flush with lots of drugs tobacco, alcohol,
| sugar, junk food, social media, reels... At society level,
| better laws and campaigns may work best but at individual
| level you'll get best ROI by focusing efforts on
| disciplining yourself and your family and friends.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > the haves get their information from trustworthy sources
| through their in-group
|
| Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I
| see them:
|
| * Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt,
| lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of
| degradation of every commons.
|
| * Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people
| earning 5 or 6 figures.
|
| * Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be
| one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
|
| Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class
| interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding
| how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world,
| while dodging genuine understanding of everything most
| important.
| exe34 wrote:
| profit. they have the best information money can buy and they
| use it to make profit.
|
| Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they
| have a perfect motive.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > a perfect motive
|
| It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly
| relevant:
|
| > Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries,
| operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in
| its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of
| deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is
| caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the
| air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth
| is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money.
|
| - Alanis Obomsawin
|
| This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people
| know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well
| over a hundred years.
|
| Yet the media and political classes do _everything_ they
| can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish"
| "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding
| that this is what their owners demand.
| cafard wrote:
| Will the last tree be cut? New England has much more
| three cover than it has a couple hundred years ago.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Will the last tree be cut?
|
| It's a metaphor (though in many parts of the world it's a
| simple fact); but yeah, it _could_ be global some day. I
| wouldn 't put it past us. We've lost countless species
| already.
|
| We've been abysmal to trees. If we were to keep losing
| forest at our current global rate we'd lose the last tree
| in 400-800 years (though tbf this is decelerating right
| now).
|
| New England has more tree cover than 200 years ago -
| great. Europe too. Is 200 years ago a good reference
| point though? Isn't that when we chopped like 80% of our
| forests down for industrialization?
|
| Anyway, so the centers of Empire are green(ish). How's
| the Amazon doing though? How's South-East Asia? Central
| Africa?
|
| And our new forests - are they old growth and diverse, or
| monoculture Sitka spruce? Organic, or doused with
| glyphosate?
|
| And then there's the climate, which we are fucking up
| faster than scientists predicted... Can trees adapt in
| time? ... Would trees survive nuclear holocaust?
|
| I'm not saying Bladerunner was a documentary. But we're
| on course for catastrophe, no doubt about it; and the
| relentless pursuit of ever more capital via externalized
| costs is why.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's two things going on here:
|
| - things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to
| be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable
| and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for
| the "financial middle class" who are still doing something
| that could be called a "job"
|
| - people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their
| biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News
| hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely
| affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be
| true.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to
| be reliable
|
| "Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here.
|
| Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers
| are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are
| they likely to teach you anything of real value.
|
| FT and Bloomberg are _extremely_ biased toward class
| interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover
| it, etc.
|
| Did they ever speak out against torture, or illegal war?
| _How much?_ Did they ever go into the long term advantages
| of Jill Stein 's economic plans; or Bernie's? _How much?_
|
| The fact that we spent over $8 trillion in a murderous
| money laundering scheme should have been front page news
| every day for years. The costs of our incredible and
| historic inequality are rarely discussed, and if they are,
| it's in the most limp manner imaginable. The opportunity
| cost of all this fuckery, from a rational economic
| perspective, is mind blowing.
|
| The Overton Window is now looking onto bipartisan genocide,
| after decades of bipartisan illegal war and an _extreme_
| agenda of Islamophobia.
|
| > people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their
| biases
|
| People like Musk _buy_ news sources to _spread_ their
| biases. Same for Murdoch, Turner, Bezos, etc.
| mistermann wrote:
| > How much?
|
| Such an important (and often unpopular) followup
| question.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I think the reason why the FT, among others, don't spend
| much space on human rights issues is because they are
| inherently transactional publications in nature. You have
| to pay to subscribe, and those who do expect something in
| return - I suspect that this is usually a sense of being
| 'in the know' on business matters. Obviously knowledge of
| Jill Stein's manifesto is not going to make its readers
| any money in the foreseeable future.
|
| I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is
| no alterior motive, I believe. Compare this to the
| tabloids, which don't charge for online access and make
| money by peddling particular business or political
| interests - mostly shady business, I think most would
| agree. I'd therefore trust FT on the facts, albeit
| probably not for wide coverage.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there
| is no alterior motive, I believe
|
| No ulterior motive? I really don't know about that.
|
| They're better than most, because they generally tell the
| truth - a shockingly low bar - but it's a specific type
| of truth, as seen from a specific and very narrow window,
| from a deliberate vantage point.
|
| Always viewing the world from that specific window belies
| a motive, conscious or not, to maintain a highly
| destructive status quo. They are not seeing the forest
| for the trees, while writing factual and detailed reports
| on the least consequential tree bark facts.
|
| Which is fine, if tree bark facts are your bag, I guess -
| but I'm more concerned about the rapidly deteriorating
| forest.
| alexashka wrote:
| Maybe what's most important to them isn't what's most
| important to you.
|
| Have you contemplated such possibility?
| mandmandam wrote:
| Yes, the ultra wealthy have different priorities to what I
| would call important. The yachts, deregulation, tacit (or
| not) support for torture, illegal wars, pollution, private
| jets, ostentatious displays of conspicuous and pointless
| wealth, etc, leave that in no doubt.
|
| Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in
| the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow?
| Like Zorg's little speech [0] about the benefits of
| destruction (the broken window fallacy)?
|
| 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkFAcFtBD48
| alexashka wrote:
| > It's astounding how people can have all the facts and
| teachers in the world, while dodging genuine
| understanding of everything most important.
|
| You said they are dodging 'genuine understanding'.
|
| I am saying you aren't the final word on what 'genuine
| understanding of everything most important' is.
|
| In other words - you are using lots of words to say 'I
| want others to do more of the stuff I want them to do and
| less of the stuff they are doing because the stuff I want
| them to do is obviously good and the stuff they are doing
| is obviously less good'.
|
| Thing is, almost _everyone_ thinks this. Given that
| almost everyone _already_ thinks this way and the world
| isn 't what you want it to be, maybe something about such
| a worldview is off. Or maybe we just need more of people
| like _you_ in positions of power and you 'll fix it :)
| Where have I heard that one before?
| mandmandam wrote:
| So anyone who uses the phrase "genuine understanding" is
| secretly a wannabe power-hungry authoritarian? Dunno
| about that one bud.
|
| And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption,
| or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal
| gain, that's not _obviously perverse_ to you; it 's just
| one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because
| they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
|
| Well, pick your prophet; pick your genius; they all say
| the same thing:
|
| "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
| needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of
| God."
|
| - Jesus.
|
| "By his craving for riches the foolish man slays himself,
| as if he were slaying others."
|
| - Buddha
|
| "The mutual rivalry for piling up of worldly things
| diverts you, until you visit the graves."
|
| - The Qur'an
|
| "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be
| contented with what he would like to have."
|
| - Socrates
|
| "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who
| craves more, that is poor."
|
| - Seneca
|
| "The more you have, the more you want. The more you have,
| the less you are."
|
| - Tolstoy
|
| "A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the
| pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
|
| - Einstein
|
| "Wealth is like seawater: the more you drink, the
| thirstier you become."
|
| - Schopenhauer
|
| "A small terrace by the mountain stream, living at ease,
| free from the burdens of the world -- this is better than
| the glory of an emperor."
|
| - Zhuangzi
|
| Etc, etc, etc.
|
| Some people, really, truly, have a genuine understanding
| of this concept. And many, probably _most_ incredibly
| wealthy people, with every possible opportunity, can 't
| grasp it for the life of them. That's not really "my
| opinion"; it's the opinion of anyone worth listening to.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| >Then why are their actions more harmful than any other
| class? I see them:
|
| Lets assume all people when given the opportunity will do
| what is in their own best interests first.
|
| The less power you have, the more working with others is in
| your own best interest.
|
| The more wealth you have, the more power you have and the
| less you _need_ to work with others to achieve what you want
| or need, so you have an increased ability to weigh what is
| best for you vs what is best for everyone.
|
| At some point the wealth/power split is so much that you can
| effectively stop caring about what everyone else wants and
| pursue what you want and what benefits you.
|
| So while they may have better information, they aren't
| incentivized to decisions that are less harmful to everyone.
|
| > Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt,
| lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of
| degradation of every commons. Paying people 6 or 7 figures to
| confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
| Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be
| one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
|
| All of those can be leveraged for profit if one is cynical
| and self-serving enough. Most of 'them' that fall into these
| categories know to some degree the actions they take are
| harmful to others, and frankly they don't care. Either in
| their own self-interest, or deluded interests of whatever
| group they identify with.
| asdff wrote:
| Part of it is a sort of pascals wager being done, where it
| becomes rational and logical to play this game as it is for
| yourself however unsavory, because the incentives for playing
| it as such are high enough where people will always do it.
| Altruism towards the collective species fundamentally takes a
| backseat for individual and kin survival. There are plenty of
| species where the mother will even eat any offspring who
| don't flee them after birth soon enough because the
| incentives for the mother even out way that small affordance
| of altruism to kin. Biology is about entropy not emotions at
| the end of the day.
| cess11 wrote:
| You really think the elites are generally better informed than
| the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities,
| gossip media and so on?
|
| I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians
| where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked
| into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews.
| Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally
| very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
| Nevermark wrote:
| "Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without
| some tight context.
|
| Most people who are really good at something, and became
| successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of
| those people read and developed complex thought, and likely
| and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not
| so much.
|
| On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of
| quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong
| correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and
| widely.
|
| I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views
| and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And
| how unaware they are that there are people around them that
| know so much more.
|
| They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are
| unaware other people have them and expand them.
|
| I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part
| of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where
| galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it
| was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had
| just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the
| picture, the concept.
|
| People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But
| people not having anything to mentally connect it to when
| they encounter it is scary.
| cess11 wrote:
| Power, like money, is mainly inherited.
| FredPret wrote:
| This sounds more like a slogan, a belief, than a fact.
|
| It's not true for the extreme top end: [0]
|
| Here's a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to
| investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper
| middle class: [1]
|
| We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest
| and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing
| everything.
|
| This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are
| replaced.
|
| What may fool you though is that all successful people
| are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle).
| But they are not the same people.
|
| [0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-
| self-made
|
| [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-
| made-les...
| cess11 wrote:
| There is no self-made wealth. You can't become wealthy
| without the labour of other people.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-
| billion...
|
| The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they
| counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs'
| rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running
| a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely
| connected to their families being privileged and the
| nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
| FredPret wrote:
| You know you've gone off the deep end when you call Musk
| an "entrepreneur" in quotes instead of what he is - a
| regular, if excellent, entrepreneur.
|
| Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background
| invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and
| politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as
| members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of
| prominence from there.
|
| That's fundamentally different from inheriting power even
| if you're a dunce as kings once did.
| latexr wrote:
| > It's not true for the extreme top end
|
| Any extreme is, by definition, unusual. You don't need to
| be a billionaire (which is what the articule you linked
| to focus on) to be considered powerful or wealthy.
|
| Tellingly, that articles notes that:
|
| > The proportion of those in the list who grew up poor or
| had little wealth remained constant at roughly 20 percent
| throughout the same period.
|
| Which suggests that inheriting power and money _does_
| make a difference in your chance of success. They
| continue:
|
| > Most individuals on the Forbes 400 list did not inherit
| the family business but rather made their own fortune.
|
| But one does not follow from the other. Inheriting a
| business is not the only way to have a leg up. If you're
| well off you have _the opportunity_ to risk going into
| some venture on your own and fail, because you have a
| safety net. Furthermore, your affluent family can and
| probably will make a difference in your business. I'm
| reminded of a piece of news a while back where a couple
| of rich kids were bragging they made their company
| successful "from scratch" but upon further inspection
| into it was revealed their customers were rich friends of
| their parents.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| But they are better informed about and better placed to
| exploit the things that are profitable. The rest is just
| background noise.
| cess11 wrote:
| My impression is that generally they surround themselves
| with people that are well informed and rely on them.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots
|
| Tautology.
|
| > The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the
| bigger the premium is of being part of the right group
|
| There is no causal link here.
|
| It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the
| right time _always_.
|
| Social media being more or less addictive or existing _at all_
| changes this banality not.
| blackoil wrote:
| I agree with two major issues raised here. Importance of reading
| long form content and harms of environment full of distractions.
|
| Saying that solution is not turning back and giving up on
| digital. It would be same as giving up on printing to embrace a
| teacher focused learning.
| nileshtrivedi wrote:
| Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with:
| "Use decent software. And make copies."
|
| And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to
| recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to
| reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility
| and reach?
| vacuity wrote:
| I think the author would say that certain forms of content,
| like blogs, can be useful. I don't think they're completely
| eschewing digital reading, but instead pushing for far more
| print reading than is common now. The two aren't mutually
| exclusive.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign
| that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably
| narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of
| anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your
| comment.
|
| Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend
| being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most
| folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate
| uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in
| your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.
|
| I've come to believe that an important part of any society is
| creating a series of positive narrative myths that are
| increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because
| introducing negativity in any form early in the education
| process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that
| topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not
| pessimistic curmudgeons.
|
| So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're
| going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you
| about damned near everything, and a simple search online will
| prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel,
| not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not
| our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know
| ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.
|
| This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here
| decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is
| just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able
| to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The
| water's deep.
|
| You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles.
| Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the
| confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make
| a difference.
| kusokurae wrote:
| Disagree about the age threshold on epistemology. Being
| introduced to Hume in my teenage years is what got me to
| repeatedly revisit and reconsider old ideas, and look for new
| ones in much the way you describe. Human mental life &
| development isn't so simple as arbitrary age boundaries and
| specific, fixed learning environments.
|
| Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the
| ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees
| of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points,
| benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem.
|
| This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays
| like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge
| how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and
| to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon,
| and see that as something that sets you free and puts the
| onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight
| into flimsy pseudo-certainty.
|
| It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing
| books like that, they were accused by more conservative
| contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and
| dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be
| confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held
| convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any
| culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as
| nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it
| as something to celebrate and explore.
| ganzuul wrote:
| We presume that it is us who have digested the thinness of
| the veil of reality who should be deciding epistemological
| questions but it is the younger generations who have grown up
| in this environment of 'Hacking the Matrix' who have the
| moral right to do it.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I'm all for that. Sounds great.
|
| I very well might be wrong. I hope I am, since I can't of
| any other way to make things work.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would
| recommend being 30+ before you read.
|
| I think you may be on to something, but I would also add that
| maybe you should consider whether prior to the age of 13 may
| also be a viable range. I think 13 to _it depends_ is when
| the problem (roughly, the mind /ego "coming into its own", or
| something like that) manifests.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced
| society. There simply is not time and effort enough available
| for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical
| trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > you can't live like that
|
| Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up
| the individual, it undermines all social institutions.
|
| A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological
| Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of
| knowledge and meaning" and for that to collapse would be
| different from what people talk about more widely which is
| "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration in common knowledge and
| disappearance of meaning, trust, truth, veracity.
|
| Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in
| one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You
| can see it everywhere. But I argue that no single technology
| is the cause of it - rather what people do and how tech
| alters their behaviour. Look at this adjacent thread on
| whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video".
| This rather simple debate raises a more or less
| "unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated
| electronic test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated
| expertise,, what do you really know about the relation
| between an LED and covert surveillance.
|
| In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use
| knowledge and maybe to use it in a different way.
|
| [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-
| its-ca...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259278
| llm_trw wrote:
| >You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term
| toxicity studies.
|
| I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with
| the corpus of works.
|
| In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who
| happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world
| university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible
| customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the
| next 6 months.
|
| Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they
| were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and
| was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to
| all the journals legally unlike the average person.
| mistermann wrote:
| If one is able to be comfortable with the unknown (a state
| that can't be escaped _except through a simulation_ ),
| checking everything isn't required.
|
| It's like juggling three balls in a way: if you can't do it,
| it isn't necessary to believe you can. So too with knowledge,
| except it's like a thousand times as hard.
| jl6 wrote:
| > all produced information is unavoidably narrativization
|
| This is a future possibility but it has not yet come to pass,
| and we can still avoid it. We are not _yet_ adrift in a sea of
| epistemological relativism where everyone has their own truth,
| and no objective truth can be discerned. We don 't need to
| succumb to this kind of nihilism. Truth and objective reality
| _are_ still discernable and approachable. Philosophical
| objections to the Truly objective viewpoint are not the
| limiting factor.
|
| "Everything is just a narrative" is the cry of those who don't
| have truth on their side. The current state of mass media is
| the result of their cries becoming louder. We don't have to go
| along with it.
| retskrad wrote:
| Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and
| ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less
| educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of
| extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives
| who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their
| life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into
| a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting
| information is different--not better, just different.
| clarionbell wrote:
| The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if
| they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on
| the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative
| outlook.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Yeah. I struggle to understand how podcasts and youtube are
| an efficient learning resource. They are slow, unstructured,
| and unsearchable. Whilst some software can ameliorate some of
| these (e.g. playback speed control), there's no analogue to
| the process of "can skip this paragraph, can skip this
| paragraph, let's search back for the definition of this term,
| let's cross-reference this term with this other text, let's
| see how many pages are left in this chapter...".
|
| I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and
| pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their
| phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that
| and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by
| learning like that.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of
| everything having to be a video. I can read much-much
| faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can
| easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can
| see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days
| everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and
| there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even
| though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow.
| So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I
| have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10
| minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to
| smash that bell because it helps me so much"...
|
| </old man yells at cloud>
| 1aqp wrote:
| Hear! hear!
| torlok wrote:
| It's not about being old fashioned. If you can't maintain
| focus to read a book, you're obviously not truly engaging
| with the material. How far are you going to get in a
| field, if you're reliant on having everything explained
| to you in simple terms.
| fiforpg wrote:
| Not only written text is a faster way to communicate
| information, it is so because it has much bigger context
| window:
|
| "A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time,
| either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in
| short term memory.
|
| "A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There
| can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy
| to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any
| order.
|
| In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally
| low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a
| text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that
| the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory,
| to understand, etc.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video
| for home improvement stuff, because instructions for
| those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The
| problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an
| appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things.
| Raw text is a better tool for other.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| The good thing about videos is that you can literally see
| somebody doing something from end tonend
|
| Not just the critical part described in an article
| n4r9 wrote:
| Surely an article can cover a process end-to-end, just as
| a video can focus on only a critical part. Do you mean
| that the medium of video encourages the author to be more
| thorough?
| high_na_euv wrote:
| Sometimes I like to watch how someone does something cuz
| you can see interesting things
|
| E.g watching developer write software can show you things
| about OS usage, IDE usage, automation and other tricks
| and habbits
| n4r9 wrote:
| That's fair. Someone commented in a different fork that
| videos are good for DIY jobs, and I totally agree. You
| want to see a person doing it live, so you can imitate
| their motions. I was thinking about learning something
| theoretical, like mathematics or history.
| oytis wrote:
| I also see that in real world too. Too many times I wished a
| book existed to learn this or that and got an answer that you
| really need to hang out in multiple Discord groups to stay
| up-to-date. Newer generation apparently has less difficulty
| with that.
|
| Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual
| tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and
| explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that
| theoretical education leaves open.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Maybe they just think they do because they don't know any
| better?
|
| Or constant stream of information gives them the illusion
| of staying informed
| xorcist wrote:
| From my experience it is obviously the latter. Reading well,
| on paper or on screen, really requires you to put your
| complete attention to it. Audio (podcasts) and video
| (youtube) have the advantage of not requiring your complete
| attention. Everything else follows from that. Of course it
| can fit some people better. Just not where it matters.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| There's no such thing as multitasking. It is a literal
| illusion and is one big reason why people who can't sit
| down and actually read a book (or lie down with eyes closed
| and LISTEN to a podcast/lecture) produce for themselves the
| illusion of understanding.
| zusammen wrote:
| The point these focus-deprived children could accurately make
| is that our adult world is also about reward hacking and
| bullshit metrics. I'm old but I will tell you that everything
| I dislike that I see in the young is society's fault. We did
| a truly terrible job of giving them a world in which to
| become better, rather than worse, people.
|
| In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic
| weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you
| could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job
| interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024,
| actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again
| and "well-adjusted" people realize that their ability to
| afford food and housing relies on the use of information to
| form a collage beneficial to one's personal image--not deep
| understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not
| the high-risk generation of anything new.
| Yeul wrote:
| Kids see adults who don't read so why should they?
|
| It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to
| become successful because nobody has the reading or
| concentration skills. When I was a child I taught myself
| English by playing Planescape Torment.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I often find the voice acting to be interminably slow and
| distracting and immersion breaking somehow. You are just
| waiting for the voice actor to slowly emote it all. I
| like how Morrowind did it when questing. Some flavor
| voice to set the mood and then great writing you read.
| Full voice acting for important parts and scenes.
| zusammen wrote:
| My kids convinced me to try out a couple of those old
| final fantasy games from the 90s. As someone who studied
| Kabbalah I was intrigued by the fact that they named a
| character Sephiroth, although the character really had
| nothing to do with the name or concept. Anyway, I was
| already old so I didn't have the same emotional
| connection (except when that girl was killed) because
| neither the writing nor the realism was at a level I
| hadn't seen before. It definitely would have hit me hard
| at 13, though. Really hard.
|
| Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion
| through realism, not writing. I won't say the quality of
| the writing doesn't matter but it's not what makes a
| great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed
| plots and writing but do the game part extremely well.
| And video games are the best way to make a story
| accessible to a large number of people. I don't think the
| written word puts a story into the center of a culture
| anymore.
|
| The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility
| but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no
| video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what
| the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such
| an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don't how you
| tell teenagers, if you're teaching language and
| literature, that people had the same strong emotional
| reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to
| video games.
|
| Oddly enough I'm reading a fantasy novel right now by
| someone who used to be part of this community. It's far
| better than I expected it to be, and it's causing me to
| rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to
| read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades
|
| Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things
| at all, or when there is no grade involved?
|
| Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can
| these people actually digest and understand complex and
| longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that
| requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you
| will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand
| boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and
| learning.
|
| When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading
| anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright
| impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up.
| These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't
| accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a
| part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted
| summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to
| tell them what and how to think about something without
| engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that
| sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the
| default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual
| curiosity.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Remember when films used to be a tight 90 minutes of snappy
| editing. Now everything is getting close to 3 hours, it's not
| because the stories are better or more complex it's people
| not being ruthless in their editing.
|
| I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As
| I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief
| that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was
| just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing
| words.
|
| Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes
| what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to
| focus their effort.
| gitanovic wrote:
| That is very true, although I also have the opposite
| example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one
| for calculus) were so dense with information that I could
| not make head and tails
|
| I often had to buy a second book where the content was...
| well digestible
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Keep in mind that some of the criteria have changed as well
| over time, probably not as fast as technology itself, but
| skills like reading comprehension are tested for less in favor
| of e.g. tech literacy.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to
| read a book to save their life
|
| That's sad. There are many times in life one will need to do
| what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and
| these kids are being set up for failure.
| switch007 wrote:
| It's sad on the human level too. A family member or friend
| may have a difficult issue that takes more than 2 minutes to
| discuss, but a person won't have the attention span to
| listen.
|
| No wonder therapists are raking it in and short supply.
| ethernot wrote:
| I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger
| and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the
| younger students to compose complex abstract processes.
|
| When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised
| against their peers. It requires a little more academic
| comparison across age groups.
| sudahtigabulan wrote:
| Isn't it also because of a change in testing methods? It
| seems to me that multiple choice tests are more and more
| widespread. These can be gamed more easily, since you can
| often eliminate some of the choices based on knowledge
| unrelated to the correct answer.
|
| For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades
| ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test _ever_.
| Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe. Everything was
| problems, proofs, or essays.
| ethernot wrote:
| I haven't seen an increase in multiple choice tests in my
| area (mathematics). We still require written answers and
| proofs. Some testing is computer-based but it requires
| entry of formulated results properly.
|
| Really I spend my days shovelling PDFs around.
| lolc wrote:
| Yes it was uncommon for me too. Our teacher in electronics
| back then did give us a multiple choice test because we
| asked so persistently. He wanted proof for why the option
| was chosen though. I thought he was just taking the piss
| but for one answer I could use proof by elimination and he
| accepted that. That proof was probably more work than just
| adding up a bunch of resistors, but it was also more fun
| :-)
| tgv wrote:
| > Times have changed.
|
| Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant
| anything.
|
| > Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those
| [...].
|
| Proof needed. You can't just say that.
|
| > I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to
| read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades
| because they were born into a world of technology.
|
| The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that
| (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to
| pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being
| born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using
| that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you
| with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few
| secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of
| primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to
| what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not
| maths or physics.
|
| And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades
| are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read.
| Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your
| cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > ...secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and
| physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago.
|
| On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation,
| because more than just the test has changed since that time.
| For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a
| test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are
| the present-day students being taught to a test from four
| decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would
| need to control for in order to accurately compare
| performance over time. Although there are certainly people
| who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to
| ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back
| from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a
| knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance.
| What do people need to know now, and what books should be
| read by students in order to learn it?
| rixed wrote:
| > secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and
| physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago
|
| But can pupils from 30 or 40 years ago pass today's exams?
| tgv wrote:
| I actually did a few math exams recently (I was helping
| someone study for them), and they were really too easy. I
| had a hard time catching up with uni maths after breezing
| through secondary school, but if they nowadays enter with
| that level, it must be a nightmare.
| cglace wrote:
| What will they do when there isn't a podcast or video to teach
| them a concept?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I don't think ChatGPT belongs with the other two. It
| essentially counts as reading.
| torlok wrote:
| YouTube and podcasts are fine as an introduction to a topic,
| but they are and do encourage passive consumption. It's fine
| for reciting shallow factoids in class and getting grades, but
| won't make you an expert in a field. If you can't maintain
| enough attention to read, you'll always have to rely on
| processed, second hand information. That's why reading needs to
| be taught as a skill, and heavily encouraged.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I think it is two-sided.
|
| The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to
| speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will
| use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more
| materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation
| from social groups.
|
| The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed
| addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent
| simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to
| things that are very harmful.
| jprete wrote:
| I don't see any serious "right way" as you describe it. In
| particular I don't see a lot of motivation from social
| groups, and the Internet is horrible for good feedback
| because lots of people respond to things from a purely
| emotional place.
| lordnacho wrote:
| For instance, if you want to use the internet to get ahead
| of your curriculum, you can watch Khan Academy videos and
| do exercises. Not all that different from doing the same
| with a book, but with the internet you get a lot of curated
| material for free.
|
| You can connect with other learners, you can ask questions
| on forums.
| 7222aafdcf68cfe wrote:
| I find three challenges with YouTube and podcasts:
|
| 1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to
| be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people
| discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to
| discover.
|
| 2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can
| be.
|
| 3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment"
| than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but
| students get lectures in school too.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| Grades are irrelevant
|
| We all know students with good grades who struggle at exams
| Jedd wrote:
| > Students who use ChatGPT ... to complete their academic tasks
| aren't shallower or less educated ...
|
| Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your
| observations of your younger relatives?
|
| Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated
| with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years
| spent mastering' with LLMs.
| youoy wrote:
| Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more
| efficient to build a high level map of the subject using
| podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you
| have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the
| dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking
| for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read
| is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and
| the end result is the same.
|
| Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end
| up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not
| being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge
| successfully.
|
| Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is
| enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing
| similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense
| books...
| bayindirh wrote:
| Disclosure: I worked on developing smartboard technology for
| students in my country.
|
| Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part:
| https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
|
| On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these
| findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but
| just listening prevents things from being committed to longer
| term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many
| interesting things they have watched made a change in their
| lives?
|
| There's also mounting research that writing is different than
| typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain
| fundamentally works.
|
| I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on
| notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a
| better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored
| in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to
| replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they
| work in tandem. Not against each other.
|
| From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in
| compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors.
| Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term,
| and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
|
| We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological
| acceleration via external devices. Nature has different
| priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn
| this the hard way.
|
| If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge,
| your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans
| increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on
| top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you
| externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of
| them becomes almost impossible.
|
| The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook
| readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free
| device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a
| superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being
| constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats
| carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| That's why I'm excited about the new batch of PineNote
| devices, e-readers running Linux with a custom GNOME theme
| and a passive stylus.
|
| And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity
| software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper.
| Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be
| a good enough compromise.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I exclusively use fountain pens and higher quality
| wirebound notebooks and notepads.
|
| I number the notebook, and write the start date at first
| page. Then I number the pages as I go, and date every page.
|
| When the notebook finishes, I remove the binding, scan it
| at 600DPI, store it as a PDF.
|
| I'll be training a local Tesseract installation with my
| hand writing one day, but I'm not there. However, these
| notebooks saved the day more than once in their current
| form.
|
| I'm using smart devices since Palm/Handspring era. Nothing
| can replace the paper for me, and I don't want to change my
| ways from now on. So this is the method I use for quite
| some time.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > extracting information
|
| > excellent grades
|
| have nothing to do with interiority -- the main thrust of the
| article
| dagw wrote:
| _Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete
| their academic tasks aren 't shallower or less educated than
| those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting
| information from dense books_
|
| The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you
| through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll
| eventually reach a point where you need information that is
| only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that
| skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.
|
| There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about
| how a record number of university students in Sweden are
| struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of
| reading and extracting the necessary information needed from
| the textbooks.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I think it's far too early to state that with any confidence.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Every time I read about the next generation not being able to
| read, I recall all the boomers falling for penis enlargement
| pill scams again and again. Exactly the people who complain
| about standard tests being too easy nowadays are the people who
| panic at the sight of a self-checkout.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They get excellent grades because they make sure the professor
| feels that they agree with them on political and ideological
| issues. Be a nice and friendly person, and agree with the
| academics on their political beliefs and you will get good
| grades. Knowledge has nothing to do with academic grades.
|
| You could as well have written that you know young people who
| get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their
| school papers.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Funny typo in the subtitle.
|
| > Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in "The Guttenberg
| Elegies"
|
| The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the
| inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german
| politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
| tomgp wrote:
| For me Guttenberg is an actor famous for Police Academy, Short
| Circuit, and Three Men And A Baby
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg
| rpeden wrote:
| His role in The Day After is the one that always stands out
| in my mind.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| There's also a confusing typo in "the ceding of material books
| to the ephemeral gauze of the online". I presume "gauze" was
| intended be "gaze".
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Why presume that? "Gauze" makes sense.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| I read the sentence a couple of times to try to figure out
| what the phrase "ephemeral gauze" was intended to convey
| but failed to make sense of it. So, I figured that "gaze"
| may have been the intended word, i.e., readers pay
| particular attention to text while they're in the process
| of reading it (gaze) but that it's quickly forgotten when
| they move on to the next unrelated thing they see on the
| Internet (ephemerality).
|
| I'm only familiar with gauze in the context of first-aid
| kits and other medical usage so I'd appreciate hearing your
| interpretation of "ephemeral gauze".
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| As opposed to the solid materiality of books, the
| "material" of the internet is an "ephemeral gauze", a
| thin and shifting fabric (a mesh, literally a web) on
| which it would be impossible to apply ink, to hold rigid,
| etc.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Thanks. That makes sense.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if
| you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so
| bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only
| selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their
| vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow
| readers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Only selected few buy books, because it costs money_
|
| I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the
| West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead
| selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say
| this as someone without enough of the last.)
| nileshtrivedi wrote:
| Writing digitally is cheaper but that's exactly why
| distributing or getting reach is not cheap at all. You still
| need cost and proof of work in getting noticed by algorithms,
| as well as people who usually set trends. In fact, the lower
| cost of production means that more niche things get written
| than there would have been a market for.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of
| producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader
| sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows
| you to context switch to a million different things, and even
| an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of
| books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to
| carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work.
|
| There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we
| would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that
| were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours
| to the library/store to return the old one and download a new
| one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero,
| you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you
| took the time to pick out.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| That's true too. Both costs matter.
| m-i-l wrote:
| A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi
| book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of
| knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought
| would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of
| physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't
| quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given
| digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and
| physical destruction.
|
| Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when
| awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few"
| the nation would "slide, almost without noticing, back into
| superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up
| this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will
| power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some
| of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the
| mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive
| implications of the invention of the printing press to come to
| fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the
| internet as a net negative?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge
| and information destruction
|
| Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of
| knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge,
| and not all knowledge is truth.
|
| That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in
| fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital
| mass communication there's much more information than
| knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is
| not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information.
| This is why the most important skill today has shifted from
| finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today
| isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to
| create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become
| indistinguishable.
|
| And that's also of course why you find people in that camp
| today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you
| need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned
| on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't
| because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a
| library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end
| up being scammed.
|
| https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...
| usrbinbash wrote:
| The issue isn't about "screen vs. print", the issue is about
| "critical, discerning, questioning mind" vs. "mindless
| consumerism".
|
| The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by
| information being online and disseminated via browsers.
|
| It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with
| strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't
| fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics
| designed to benefit from that behavior.
|
| And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print
| [even today][1].
|
| [1]: https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-
| pr...
| everdrive wrote:
| I think it's much more fundamental than this; the new speed and
| new methods with which information can be spread are themselves
| the problem. Misinformation is downstream of this. The more
| fundamental problem seems to be tribalism, which sort of
| information can be spread quickly, (anything with strong
| emotional content, outrage, etc.) and the uncomfortable fact
| that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than
| through actual understanding. (eg: do most people really
| understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round?
| Or, do they know the earth is round because this is what
| they've been taught. I'll bet most of HN does understand this,
| but most people could no produce this if asked without any sort
| of preparation.)
|
| The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and
| it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge
| through social transfer than through actual understanding
|
| This hits the nail on the head. In the end, I am trusting
| other people to do the experiments and reporting the
| findings.
|
| I can regurgitate a lot of stuff about science, but in the
| end I believe it because I grew on the scientist side of the
| fence. If you look at conspiracy theories, the thing they
| always do is come up with a reason not to believe in the
| established authorities.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > eg: do most people really understand the geometry or
| science to prove the earth is round?
|
| During the "there are flat-earthers" fad I realized that for
| the majority of people it doesn't matter whether it's flat or
| not, the question whether it's flat or round actually only
| arises when they need to perform an action which depends on
| the Earth's shape, which is never, because most people are
| not pilots, not astronauts, etc., so for them, the model of
| Earth being flat works perfectly well.
|
| It's the same as people saying that Earth is round for most
| intents and purposes, and then a smart-ass saying "actually,
| it's not a perfectly round ball". Yes, it's not a perfectly
| round ball, but we're discussing time zones here, not local
| weather patterns.
|
| Most people say that Earth is round not because they believe
| it's the correct model for their use case, but because they
| want to belong to the club of people perceived as smart, and
| that's the view expected of a "smart" person. The flat-
| earthers perfectly uncovered this charade, by showing that
| most people just parrot "Earth is round" because that's the
| social consensus which just so happens to be true.
| Sam6late wrote:
| My 2 cents: 1- 'The Department of Education's most recent survey,
| released in June, was sensational: it found that text
| comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of
| four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020,
| and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points
| compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-
| performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded
| in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.' More here
| https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a...
|
| 2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of
| 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a
| niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka
| money, it also cites the following:
|
| Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the
| tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche
| Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by
| catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic
| Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and
| Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and
| focusing on high-quality content.
|
| I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it
| will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high
| quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about
| capable editorial talents and other production means,
| photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-
| COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to
| the rest departments.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| Are demographics controlled for here? We know the proportion of
| foreign born has been increasing since the 70s, are these
| results attempting to remove the effect of non-native speakers?
| bayindirh wrote:
| There's another, more global research:
| https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-
| faile...
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| >foreign born
|
| Its probably more useful to distinguish between foreign
| educated vs born here.
|
| Interestingly the last stats I remember seeing about ESL
| students is they tend to out-perform english students in a
| number of subjects depending on the age group, so factoring
| them out might lower the overall stats and show an even worse
| trend among native born english speaking American students.
| oidar wrote:
| >I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it
| will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high
| quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about
| capable editorial talents and other production means,
| photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers
| pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that
| applies to the rest departments.
|
| What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is
| there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?
| randysalami wrote:
| The middle class is being liquidated
| xethos wrote:
| First lack of budget to keep them there full time, then
| they'll re-skill and change industries due to lack of job
| opportunities. Sooner or later they won't be able to easily
| go back, because tools, styles, and publisher and reader
| tastes change, as well
|
| If you spend a decade or three learning and perfecting your
| trade, and spend a decade away from it without practicing,
| you'll be rusty (at best) regardless of what the job actually
| is
|
| This fuels everything from shipbuilding to the military
| industrial complex - you practice and improve by constantly
| doing and refining, and your nation can end up a world-leader
| in designing microprocessors or building supersonic fighters
| igor47 wrote:
| In "Slouching Towards Utopia" there's a lot of emphasis on
| "communities of practice". I think HN is a great example for
| software people. I wonder if the hollowing out of print media
| begins a vicious cycle where the community of practice also
| decays. People leave the industry, connections don't persist
| across jobs, fewer events, fewer new people coming in and
| getting excited, etc...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The COVID school closures and remote learning years will prove
| to be the biggest negative educational/developmental impact on
| a generation that we've seen in a long time.
| analog31 wrote:
| At least it will lay to bed the sentiment that nothing is
| learned at school, and that we all could have just stayed
| home and taught ourselves to code.
|
| It also challenges the belief that what education needs right
| now is disruption.
| archagon wrote:
| I don't think it will. See: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2024/nov/27/republican-b...
| MarcScott wrote:
| And it disproportionately hit the poorest in society the
| most. My kid had his own room to work in, his own computer to
| work on, and WFH parents to help him out. He was not,
| massively, negatively impacted.
|
| In my work, I was in touch with families with multiple
| children at home, no computers, maybe one or two phones, and
| no broadband connection. The kids, for all intents and
| purposes, just lost two years of education.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very
| few... [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their
| own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority" the
| nation would "slide, almost without noticing, back into
| superstition and darkness."
|
| Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they
| excessively question those in authority...?
| vacuity wrote:
| > Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they
| excessively question those in authority...?
|
| At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of
| authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to
| (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when
| the conventionally powerful people own the content
| producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there
| are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange
| as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted
| recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not
| simple at all, who to listen to.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >"If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is
| that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the
| specific contents,"
|
| This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of
| the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from
| the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised
| for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill -
| and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and
| unchanged.
|
| So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers,
| proudly read by people who think they're doing something
| intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where
| a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's
| committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in
| technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to
| Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
|
| TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust
| denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a
| prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't
| have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and
| Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just
| because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the
| loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the
| prescience of people like rms.
|
| Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the
| Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it
| other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being
| entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
|
| >Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how
| The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the "whipping boy
| for the ills of western society," claiming that Birkerts'
| argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the
| "Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture." Here's
| the thing some thirty years later, however--Birkerts was right.
|
| Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of
| truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates
| are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention -
| not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as
| much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations,
| literacy rates continue to rise.
|
| But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief
| results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff
| like:
|
| >The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of
| digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even
| more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-
| itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection--of
| privacy--is obscured in the virtual domain.
|
| No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe
| this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are
| quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're
| just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
|
| [1]
| https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-li...
| nataliste wrote:
| Cronus eats his children.
|
| In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed _De laude scriptorum_ , "In
| Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing
| press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of
| the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as
| well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have
| the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
|
| Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst _books_ themselves
| in the _Phaedrus_ (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will
| implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise
| memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things
| to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
| external marks."
|
| And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a
| curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will
| child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
|
| And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature
| has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia
| for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path
| the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the
| common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote
| one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos
| the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to
| Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this,
| that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might
| write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to
| Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and
| his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is
| Mordor.'"
|
| In short, Cronus eats his children.
| le-mark wrote:
| Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how
| television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but
| instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the
| losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has
| always been so, or worse.
| vacuity wrote:
| It's basically constant that many people will fearmonger and
| some will embrace new technology. I think this is basically
| independent of the actual merits and drawbacks of the given
| technology. Regardless of these strange asymptotes, I would say
| technology has been advancing from less benefit/risk to more in
| time, and so we will get closer to the fearmongerers being
| right. I suppose it could mean that we harness the benefits and
| waive the risks, but in practice it seems unlikely.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| <golf clap>
| bostonwalker wrote:
| Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the
| recommendation of some commenters here.
|
| Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the
| article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print
| to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the
| transforming of not just education, but also news reporting,
| political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms
| of entertainment.
|
| One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as
| a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where
| each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that
| people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most
| disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be
| chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of
| grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to
| reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
|
| Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a
| natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us
| to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made
| in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in
| the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our
| ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to
| tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would
| be reflected in test scores.
|
| On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet
| world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive
| time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche
| content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper
| thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever
| possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available
| to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the
| firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form
| dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary,
| I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every
| day.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news
| as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches,
| where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic
| narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and
| where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and
| murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece
| about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability
| of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and
| heard._
|
| David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John
| from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV
| shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public
| basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news
| changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we
| watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we
| don't get outraged, we get bored.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?
|
| I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex
| ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer
| than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
|
| Let alone the median general public.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Probably not, as long as we continue the requirement that all
| information conveyed to the public must be done in a way that
| is maximally profitable to the producer. As long as
| information must be profitable, it will inevitably cease to
| be information and turn into entertainment soon enough. When
| was the last time you saw a TV Station that wasn't majority
| ads?
| asdff wrote:
| At the same time its not like the harder information isn't
| available. One can find factual news and pieces of
| information. This is what the policy wonks who craft policy
| that the pr wonks spin into soundbites have to be able to
| find and read to understand the world after all.
|
| Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News
| isn't to be informed for most people. It is for
| entertainment like any other fodder content shoehorned into
| some free minutes of your day. And that's ok because as
| long as some technical people need to actually get things
| done, there is good information and data out there for you
| to actually learn about the world. It just will be in some
| dry .gov website or some other source perhaps instead of
| distilled down to a 2 min article written to a 6th grade
| reading level with a catchy headline on cnn.com, but thats
| OK. You will learn to appreciate the dryness and technical
| language.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You can stop pretending that the contents of the news-show
| has any relation to reality.
|
| IMO, the entire problem comes from this one lie. But you
| see... a lot of people wants this propaganda machine.
|
| Also, nowadays you can stream deep journalism that people can
| adjust to their time availability. We usually call those
| "documentaries". Most of the stuff that carries that name is
| psychotic garbage too, but informative ones do exist.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How does the relation of news shows content to 'reality'
| matter?
|
| Even if the announcers were reading complex fan fiction
| stories they would still need to break it up into tiny
| chunks.
| exceptione wrote:
| The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of
| highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit
| entertainment in order to find it?
|
| Simple but effective solution:
|
| 1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a
| journalistic code.
|
| 2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment,
| click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply
| with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
|
| 3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from
| any commercial interests.
|
| Or democracy will perish eventually.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| The following item counters and possibly invalidates the
| above assertion "simple":
|
| - News reporting is straightforward insofar as requiring a
| code. Opinion about news is where it gets messy - if someone
| has a TV or radio show where they render their opinions or
| thoughts about news events, that's first amendment territory.
|
| The following item counters and possibly invalidates the
| above assertion "effective":
|
| - Journalism probably must be scalably funded to scalably
| exist. We see currently that people are not willing to do
| that and that opinion heads pervade the "news and
| information" space. So requiring compliance to a code in
| order to profit off of journalism doesn't work for the same
| reason minimum wage doesn't really work - people can just
| choose not to interact with code-compliant journalism much
| like companies can just not hire people.
|
| The following item counters and possibly invalidates both the
| above assertions "simple" and "effective" at once.
|
| - You cannot separate any board of X from political
| interests, which are much more important if commercial
| interests are explicilty separated from X.
|
| > Or democracy will perish eventually.
|
| None of the above counters or invalidates this statement.
| exceptione wrote:
| (Although the response is not gibberish, I can't feel
| certain that I reply to a chatgpt response (?))
|
| You take it too static. If you are waiting for the type-
| safe, leak free hammered approach, you will achieve
| nothing.
|
| I want you to take this approach to get you going in the
| right direction. Opinion pieces
|
| - Opinion pieces are indeed a way where editorial boards go
| cheap, outsourcing meta thinking to external
| entities/influence. Those editorial boards going of the
| rails there is not an act of nature, but like in the case
| of the NYT a consequence of commercial ownership. As part
| of the code any opinion piece should be clearly marked as
| such, as well as the interests of the author.
| Journalism probably must be scalabe
|
| There is no need for scalable mega media corporations. In
| countries with 1) public news organizations[*] and 2)
| required independent editorial boards, commercial titles
| are not as going overboard as in the US.
| You cannot separate any board of X from political interests
|
| You can, but you can never be absolute 100% perfect.
|
| A peculiar, mindset has been programmed that ethics in
| society is defined in what what terms the lawyer wrote. A
| good society is all about what you collectively allow or
| disallow, no scheme, no law can perfectly defeat all bad
| actors all the time.
|
| The social part of "society" is an activity. If you as
| normal people don't show up, then it will be a Murdoch
| party.
|
| ___
|
| * independent from but financed by the state
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Both _composing text_ and _reading_ map closely to _thinking_.
|
| The physical act of _writing_ , especially with pen, pencil, or
| quill, involves _planning and structuring_ (both on-page
| planning and grammatical construction).
|
| For generations of learners to have lost this ability must
| eventually have a heavy social cost.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the
| article
|
| Strange that _religion_ isn 't mentioned in the article.
|
| Religion is the bedrock of epistemological 'collapse'.
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| > Amusing Ourselves to Death
|
| From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing-
| and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy
| theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they
| knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So
| much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people
| for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are
| becoming more commonplace.
| asdff wrote:
| I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv
| "informed person" that either never really existed as such, or
| merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet
| content in the form of _Atlantic_ articles over tick toks and
| pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and
| driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old
| as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as
| sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern
| times.
| bostonwalker wrote:
| Naively, I would think the same. But in the first part of
| AOTD, Neil Postman argues pretty convincingly that America in
| the 18th and 19th centuries was the most literate, bookish
| society on Earth and in the later parts of the book that that
| heritage was lost with the invention of the telegraph, radio,
| and later TV.
|
| In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not
| "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made
| us dumber in a real sense.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "Wen Stephenson at the Chicago Review claimed [...] he
| experienced no difference in parsing Seamus Heaney on the page as
| opposed to the screen, asking "does it matter that it is
| transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? ...the
| question is beginning to bore me by now."
|
| Well said. For the act of reading digital origin changes the
| quality but only in minor ways. What we all failed to anticipate
| we're the gross effects of segmentation, disintegration, infinite
| duplication of media.
| karel-3d wrote:
| This article is too long, I will let NotebookLM make a fake
| podcast out of it
| lazystar wrote:
| this type of situation is not unique in human history - it
| happens after the invention of any device that disseminates
| information on a mass scale. for example, see the printing press:
|
| > The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the
| Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which
| permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively
| unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas
| transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and
| threatened the power of political and religious authorities.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
|
| in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers
| time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is
| spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the
| past when faced with this problem.
| vacuity wrote:
| I think the Internet medium is sufficiently different from past
| advancements that such analogies don't work. It's not
| necessarily that the Internet brings fundamentally different
| capabilities, perhaps we can reason about how its new scale
| makes some capabilities emerge as others, but it's the same
| outcome either way.
| pavlov wrote:
| I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle
| of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records.
|
| In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom
| gave away in a yard sale. Now they're produced again as a high-
| end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year.
|
| Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and
| arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from
| the ad-filled old media products.
| bradfa wrote:
| Totally agree! I subscribe to one magazine which is published
| once a quarter, it costs me about $40/year for the subscription
| but is well worth it to me as the content is not available
| anywhere else. Definitely a niche market but the rag does a
| very good job of catering exactly to its market. There's still
| some ads but only a handful per issue that normally has 60-100
| pages total.
| privong wrote:
| > Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion
| and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently
| from the ad-filled old media products.
|
| This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years.
| E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda.
| Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and
| lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also
| had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ
| over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar
| issues.
|
| [0] http://www.alpinist.com/ [1]
| https://www.surfersjournal.com/
| Mistletoe wrote:
| We still get Architectural Digest and I enjoy looking at it in
| a way I never would online.
| benreesman wrote:
| We really fucked up when we didn't regulate smart phones like
| weapons grade uranium.
|
| It's so fucking toxic. And I'm well aware there are gems in the
| museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers
| of gift shop TikTok shit (and it's plausible that YouTube will be
| Alphabet's undoing because YouTube is great for education and a
| well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a
| dockyard crane).
|
| Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in
| it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low
| capital gains are rape) can't cope: it's no longer just
| implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis,
| society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human
| sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a
| successful match "churn", and just every godawful thing.
|
| The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for
| the "best version of the argument".
|
| Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the
| argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form
| in charge of anything worth a billion dollars.
|
| There are gems, it's not all garbage, but if every smartphone on
| the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look
| less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third
| places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly
| sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath
| would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis.
|
| And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP
| astrology says things are.
| grantmuller wrote:
| The irony of reading this article surrounded by a cacophony of
| flashing and scrolling ads is not lost on me.
| ByteExplorer wrote:
| Ed Simon's reflection on Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies in
| In Praise of Print thoughtfully challenges the prevailing
| assumption that digital media will inevitably replace print.
| iandanforth wrote:
| This is a frustratingly bad article.
|
| The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that
| the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable,
| and _not the content_.
|
| This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in
| defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they
| enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble
| coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You
| might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books.
| It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet.
|
| The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to
| anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed.
|
| Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed
| out how long form content trains concentration, short and long
| term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince
| that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.
| vacuity wrote:
| Perhaps the author doesn't make the case well, but the
| implication is that reading print primes the mind in a way that
| presents better emotional and intellectual consumption of the
| content.
| tempodox wrote:
| > Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM
| punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data
| concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people
| now enabling authoritarianism.
|
| Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.
| tapanjk wrote:
| > "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic
| sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of
| reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the
| alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."
|
| Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic
| e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible
| to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the
| books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a
| dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no
| highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no
| nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will
| be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That seems a bit wasteful? Any time you want to read a new book
| you buy a whole new reading device? It might be cheap but
| that's more e-waste we don't need.
|
| Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card?
| You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading
| experience can then be totally offline as you describe.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| > It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss
| is out.
|
| Oh no, that's just... why?
|
| At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a
| book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library
| boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if
| it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.
|
| I mean if you're a publisher, hoping to cash in on people
| wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale
| doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental
| consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list
| what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least
| make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
| Yawrehto wrote:
| I recently read _Reader, Come Home_ by Maryanne Wolf, which makes
| many similar arguments, and found myself agreeing with this. I
| 've been finding it harder and harder to lose myself in a book,
| to finish books, to read as I used to read. It's as if the lens
| through which I view reading and books has shifted - from a way
| to be thrust into another world, to something to be browsed in
| short, easy-to-read snippets, like social media but with things
| like covers and jackets and spines.
|
| I'd also like to note that, while the printed book is certainly
| not perfect at staying through the ages - something like stone
| tablets are probably best for that - it's a lot more reliable
| than online things. Maybe that'll change, but for now, tech
| companies go out of business a lot more frequently than floods or
| fires or other disasters strike the average house. And while, if
| Simon and Schuster go out of business, that doesn't do a thing to
| the books you have purchased from them, if Amazon goes out of
| business, there's no guarantee any of your Kindle will be
| readable anymore.
| vacuity wrote:
| I envision that meme of having large bookshelves filled with
| books, something I could show off to friends as a proof that
| there is still plenty to be found in books, that I've found
| valuable in books. That on some days I might take the time to
| sit down, brew some tea or something, and read a book.
| nataliste wrote:
| >The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of
| scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is
| the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty
| thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories:
| those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco,
| what a library you have! How many of these books have you
| read?" and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the
| point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage
| but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than
| unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you
| do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the
| currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
| wobbles1995 wrote:
| When you live in a society that no longer values knowledge or
| compassion, there's no point is wasting your time trying to go
| back to the old golden years. Maybe just accept anti
| intellectualism is the only way to succeed in the world and work
| around that? Elon Musk, the most successful man in the world is
| anti intellectual, why would you fool yourself into thinking
| there might be another future?
| blackoil wrote:
| IIRC one of the common factor with genius/prodigies of
| yesteryears is they all worked 1:1 or in a small group with some
| reasonably talented teachers. Unfortunately that is not scalable
| for mass, so may be custom designed Device + LLM may work better
| than giving up digital.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in
| a class full of kids much smarter than me.
|
| As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda
| worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various
| interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus
| rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely
| useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more
| engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the
| rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).
|
| Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be
| marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters
| that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart
| is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be
| triggered that often.
|
| The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of
| that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.
|
| I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need
| to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my
| approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital
| access will be the initial approach.
| rixed wrote:
| Internet is a faster printing press therefore more people can be
| subjected to more lies than before, but the issue at hand, the
| one mentioned in Sagan's quote, is orthogonal to that question
| and predates it. Did the printing press started a revolution in
| knowledge, or wars of religions?
|
| Can printed books save us?
|
| I admit I oftentime rejoice that printing felt out of fashion, so
| the printed books that are left are saved from the progress of
| psyops and the invasion of AI, which may make it easier for
| future generation(s?) to see through the blindfold of fantasies
| that will be setup for them.
|
| The article site 1984 as an illustration of how printed books can
| help resist surveillance. Well, it did not turn out that great
| for the main character of that book.
|
| Books are a sedative not a cure.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Quote of the day.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or
| wars of religions?
|
| That's a great question.
|
| The answer is very well known. It started both.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| How do e-readers fit in here?
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-
| form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue.
|
| I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading
| on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with
| much less RSI and eye strain.
|
| Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written
| paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of
| changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on
| 'digital'.
|
| When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is
| I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the
| introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is
| also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept
| by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally
| and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to
| come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its
| often a grey area for many.
| asdff wrote:
| The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that
| these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even
| ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive
| our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince
| paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was
| the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to
| control their position. It has always been useful to control
| the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than
| truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy
| us like music notes completing a chord progression.
| Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate
| crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain
| compatibility. It just exists.
| grey-area wrote:
| The title seems to make the incorrect assumption that print (ink
| on paper) is the only way to read.
| cafard wrote:
| >> Mine is an estimably materialist variety of mysticism though,
|
| Esteemed by whom?
| mlsu wrote:
| The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc,
| pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the
| experience of psychological obliteration.
|
| When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there,"
| and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self
| is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to
| gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer
| physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the
| only material loss you have is the loss of time.
|
| But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time,
| and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The
| destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to
| their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those
| echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
|
| By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be
| creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too.
| Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so
| hard.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > When _you_ get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to
| "there," and in the process, while you are "there," _your_
| entire whole self is destroyed.
|
| I think many can personally attest that either your use of
| "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of _sucked
| into_ represents a mode of engagement that only certain people
| experience at certain times.
|
| Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and
| damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
|
| Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total
| consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they
| might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may
| get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious
| intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when
| other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the
| addictions you compare it to.
| pests wrote:
| But then you have people like my one friend, who is scrolling
| non-stop literally from waking to sleep. It's hard to even
| have a 3 sentence conversation as he's constantly elsewhere.
| yawboakye wrote:
| pretty optimistic review of the power of the individual/mind
| contra the really fine-tuned algorithms of engagement. the
| hook is the "filling bits of (idle) time." the accounting
| when all the filling of bits of time is done seems to add up
| to a huge sum. the extra time definitely would have been
| borrowed (read: stolen) from somewhere.
| swatcoder wrote:
| I agree that algorithmic feeds and even just having endless
| distractions in a hip pocket are terribly unhealthy. I
| thinks its wise to be very mindful with both and that they
| can quietly steal from other experiences that one might
| prefer in hindsight.
|
| But I don't have a way to square that perspective with what
| the original commenter suggested about "psychological
| obliteration" and "addiction akin to gambling or heroin"
|
| People won't even _pay_ for most of these pocket
| distractions. They 're clearly not consuming or addictive
| in the same way as those others things, where people often
| make explicit wantonly destructive choices in service to
| their addiction.
|
| And realistically, that they're a different kind of risk
| with a different kind of impact may make them even more
| dangerous from a health-of-society perspective, because we
| don't have great cultural insight or hygeine practices to
| deal with them. If we want to change that, we need to
| recognize that they don't represent the same danger we're
| used to.
|
| So I'm not dismissing that they're bad. I'm just dismissing
| the original commenters' deeply strained and distracting
| characterization.
| marmaduke wrote:
| > People won't even pay for most of these pocket
| distractions
|
| If someone is paying, the transaction, by construction
| reinforces the psychological boundaries that obliteration
| eliminates. So I think not paying is part of it, just
| like addicts ignore the (perhaps partially non monetary)
| price of their behavior.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Ask yourself: What were the last 5 reels you watched?
| kleinsch wrote:
| You're commenting on an article about reading, which is also a
| solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you're not
| trying to make the point that reading books destroys
| relationships and self construction, so this seems like a
| roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption
| activity is better than what other people choose.
| diob wrote:
| I will say that it is different to me, but perhaps others
| consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books.
|
| To me, I do not reminisce or think about tiktoks / instagram
| posts having an impact on my life or how I think or how I
| interact with others. Five years from now I do not think I
| will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about
| the books I read. I kind of know this, as I'm thinking about
| books I read in highschool over 20 years ago at the moment.
|
| I suppose they give me things to think about beyond the
| moment I'm reading them, they make me feel things I otherwise
| wouldn't etc. It's possible for these things in media like
| movies, and even tiktok too I would imagine.
|
| The reverse is also possible for books to be junk that you
| read and enjoy in the moment but soon forget.
|
| But I also think the algorithm / profit motive behind tiktok
| and social media in general tends to mean that it's more
| likely to be junk, and it's not the person's fault who gets
| pulled into that. They're brutally effective skinner boxes,
| imo. Just like some games (mmos and now live service for even
| shooters).
|
| There's something missing in the current media landscape that
| the old one did have, which was finality. You read a book,
| it's over. Similar with older movies, but now we have a bit
| of the "keep up with the starwars or marvel" thingy which is
| a bit live service like if you think about it. A constant
| desire to make folks feel like they have to keep up. Yeah
| things had sequels before, so I'm probably just waxing
| nostalgic here.
|
| I'm rambling, sorry, just wanted to share some of my current
| thoughts.
|
| I'm sure if tiktok didn't exist, these folks would be putting
| on 24/7 soap operas instead. The desire for a background
| thing to passively consume has likely always existed. Be it
| radio, whatever.
|
| The algorithm does seem to be ruthless these days though, god
| if I know what I mean by that.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| > perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram
| like I do books
|
| > Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember
| a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read
|
| Exactly what I was thinking. I can still tell you about the
| first novel I read, first trilogy, favorite books, least
| favorite, and also each of those per genre. I can tell you
| what was going on in my life at the time.
|
| The only thing I can say about social media posts are that
| I have a handful of vague memories of times when someone I
| knew or knew of would post something that made me realize
| they had a side I didn't know of, and not in a good way.
|
| I'm reminded of a quote I read recently, paraphrased:
| social media connects limbic systems, not prefrontal
| cortexes. I might take issue with the pure dichotomous
| nature of that statement, but I think it holds generally.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I wouldn't consider reading as a passive consumption. You
| have to 1. Lead and follow a tempo, essentially moving your
| eyes at the speed of you thought 2. Using imagination to
| associate what you read with other knowledges.
|
| TV and ticktock don't need 1. You can interact with a remote
| or you scrolling-thumb but interaction is not required to
| consume.
|
| 2. Isn't a necessity neither but people do use TV, ticktock
| or music to "empty their mind" by thinking to nothing else
| but the consumption flow. You _can_ do that with reading, but
| that's not an experience people usually like and they come
| back to the place their mind left.
| Spivak wrote:
| Number two but in book form is "beach reads" which can
| include your favorite trash romance or the latest "dad
| book" Vince Flynn / Clive Cussler / Tom Clancy thing. And
| given the huge popularity of the two genres folks are
| reaching for books to turn off plenty.
| wayoverthecloud wrote:
| Reading a book is not really passive. Especially if it's a
| good book. You have to constantly imagine the layouts and the
| connections the book is trying to draw. For me, after years
| of Internet, getting back to books made me appreciate my
| younger self because books need active imagination and
| follow-through in the brain. I was able to do that
| effortlessly when I was a child. In fact, if you read all the
| HN comments the way you read books, it will be challenging(if
| you have no book reading habits).
| Spivak wrote:
| This happens with all forms of art, it's not unique to the
| written word. With movies and TV you're imagining the world
| outside the frame borders. With paintings you're imagining
| the whole scene or story depending on the piece.
|
| So there's a point here that TikTok is competing for
| leisure time that in its absence has a better chance of
| being imaginative but I think that undersells the
| creativity of social media to a degree.
| bccdee wrote:
| I think that's the key thing. Social media bombards us
| with stimuli based on an algorithm optimizing for what
| will grab our attention best. It doesn't matter if it has
| value, or even if it can _hold_ our attention, because
| there 's always some new novelty in the pipeline.
|
| Long-form writing ask us to choose a subject and then
| focus deeply and deliberately on it. It's more demanding
| and more rewarding.
| grayhatter wrote:
| I don't use imagination when I read. The connections are
| instinctual, and the layouts are often irrelevant (which I
| can say because I've never attempted to consider them and
| don't ever find myself missing out on the story).
|
| I'd like to say I'm astounded when I hear other people
| visit other worlds when they read, but really that whole
| idea is so foreign to me, it might as well be a complete
| lie. I have no thread in which to pull on to begin to
| imagine it. I chalk it up to aphantasia, but my point is
| that not everyone processes and interacts with the world in
| the same way you might.
| non- wrote:
| Depends on the book. Depends on the TikTok.
|
| You can have passive experiences via either medium. TikTok
| is really optimized for that shallow level of engagement
| though and books trend in the opposite direction.
| nataliste wrote:
| >But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time,
| and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The
| destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life,
| to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is
| those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass
| sociological scale.
|
| Cervantes, 1605:
|
| >In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his
| nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark,
| poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading
| his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew
| full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments,
| quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies,
| and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his
| mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of
| was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality
| in it...
|
| Now we're all Men of La Mancha.
| crvst wrote:
| Sorry, it just sounds like a seemingly reasonable and eloquent,
| yet highly emotional speculation.
|
| "There," "here," psychological obliteration--what is this but
| sciency reasoning, on par with boomers claiming, "Games make
| kids violent"?
|
| "Your entire whole self is destroyed." Jeez.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Is the OP using terms of art?
| canadiantim wrote:
| I think this is a very salient point, namely the danger of
| passive consumption is the losing the sense of oneself. We can
| be become so absorbed by the objects of our attention that we
| forget ourselves and this has very real consequences both on of
| physiology but also our psychology. So part of the solution is
| to "remember yourself" while you're consuming or directing your
| attention towards any object, so you are the subject and you
| are attending to an object. The last piece of the puzzle is
| that both you, the subject, and the object of your attention
| are located in space, so location/context is the third
| essential aspect of the experience to internalize for proper
| harmony, as far as I understand it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm mildly affected by "modern web" issues, and I reckon that
| the imaginative part of my brain is in a coma whenever I browse
| these sites. The minute I'm outside of an internet connection,
| a whole lot of emotions, ideas, plans come back at once. And
| very very rarely can I browse the web while not losing that.
| This is something I didn't experience before... say
| smartphones, even with a good dsl line, i wasn't dilluted in
| pages likes that.
|
| ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era..
| as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye
| your perception of the web is altered IMO.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Reading great books has been one of the best experiences of my
| life. But even as an ardent bibliophile, I can't deny that the
| medium has several serious shortcomings. Books are often far too
| long. Their quality is uneven (anyone remember the Wheel of Time
| series?). In the modern era, the production, marketing,
| promotion, and review of books has become highly politicized.
| Internet text - blogs, tweets, etc - has the potential to repair
| these issues.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living
| animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to
| Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of
| imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my
| tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I
| can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly
| look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913 dictionary.
| Best of all, I can prop up my tablet on the elliptical trainer
| and read for an hour while my heart rate moves through the first
| four zones as increasing amounts of oxygenated blood rush through
| my brain causing the words to burn like fire in my mind.
|
| Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience
| to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2]
| as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in
| Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with
| paper.
|
| [0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch
|
| [1]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/middlemarch.png
|
| [2]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin.jpg
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| This. I couldn't agree more. The text is searchable, indexable,
| word definitions can be searched right within the text,
| highlights are saved and indexable, etc.
|
| Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from
| the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the
| experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the
| feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For
| those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick
| mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access
| convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being
| looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of
| weighty tomes..
|
| Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content
| is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in
| digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought
| a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about
| things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
|
| If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds
| around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell
| phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With
| this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a
| device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of
| many more spare moments between daily activities..
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial
| understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks.
| Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical
| sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10
| or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least
| between the two.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I understand what you mean about spatial understanding, and
| personally do love the the comforting reference value of
| having actual books on your shelves and being able to go back
| to specific parts of them no matter what.
|
| However, it's not hard to compensate for this with digital
| books, through bookmarking options, copy-pasting specific
| parts and storing them elsewhere (with tiny notes on page
| number and book title) and other options.
|
| I keep all of my own digital books DRM-stripped in my own
| device folders and back those up too. This to at least partly
| replicate the possession security that physical books give. I
| also absolutely never trust storing large collections of them
| on something as absurdly untrustworthy as, for example,
| "Kindle on Demand", which is on-demand right until your
| access demand arbitrarily gets ignored no matter how much
| money you spent on what were supposedly owned purchases.
| akkartik wrote:
| Yeah, I had to look closely as well to figure out what this was
| saying. The core reasoning seems to be this one sentence:
| "Printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of
| the algorithm since tinkering with code can't delete their
| contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive."
|
| But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can
| read offline to keep someone over the network from tampering
| with contents. You can advocate for and obtain DRM-free
| experiences so tampering is easier to spot. You can make many
| copies of the bits for yourself, leaning into one of software's
| great strengths. So I think there are many ways to resist the
| "neon god" here. But we do each of us have to think for
| ourselves about the consequences of our choices.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The reason for epistemological collapse is that people peeked
| behind the curtain and found that the experts were just normal
| people endowed not with some magical knowledge but just making
| things up as they go.
|
| I can do that, too, and sometimes I am better at it. Given that,
| I prefer reader-side filtering over writer-side filtering.
| hydrolox wrote:
| I think the main issue with this line of reasoning is that before
| all of these internet based forms of content, did many people
| actually read literature, like is mentioned in the article? I am
| not sure, but I would expect that the books that were read were
| probably not some high form of art but entertainment - which is
| fine of course, and it is different to a large extent from
| scrolling tiktok, but does it like up with the authors thesis
| about reading providing some deeper form of enlightenment? Maybe
| it still does, since it's still the same act of reading, but
| maybe not as much, since it's not normal "intellectual content"
| zuluonezero wrote:
| What I found particularly disturbing about this was that I had to
| swipe away two pop ups and a lower banner just to start reading.
| All the while my subconscious was asking if I would like to just
| pick up a book. Then I got distracted by an ad for another
| article on the right of the screen. .
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Someone mentions Postman below so I'm tempted to add: can the
| tech crowd try a bit of Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Guy
| Debord and the Situationists, Mark Fisher, Marhsall McLuhan,
| presumably loads of others I don't know about who have done work
| in these areas, and then maybe Michel Desmurget on the more
| science-based side of it if they want to avoid any airy-fairy
| theory.
|
| It's arguably especially wild that Desmurget doesn't get a
| mention in these discussions. Or, I mean, it would be wild in a
| world where there was a smooth and effortless flow of good ideas
| and arguments between people, maybe over some sort of
| transcontinental network...
|
| A lot of the topics that people have opinions about when it comes
| to screens and devices and health and etc have loads of studies
| on them. Which doesn't mean that everything is all solved, there
| are unexplored and uncertain areas, but reading these discussions
| you'd think there was no data out there whatsoever. There's tons!
|
| It doesn't mean either that people can't enjoy sharing opinions,
| some of the anecdotes are interesting and insightful, but there
| seems to be a few obvious arguments which are basically non-
| arguments that get trotted out, and which seem to be hindering a
| more fruitful discussion.
|
| How many times have we seen someone make a point about _the bad
| type_ of screen-use for someone to say: "yeah, but I use
| ________ like _________." or "yeah, but when you read _books_ you
| 're being antisocial _as well_. " and so on. The research on the
| topic distinguishes carefully between the different types of use!
| Etc etc, I could go on.
|
| _This comment is intended constructively_
| jaco6 wrote:
| Tech employees don't engage constructively with tech criticism
| because of self interest.
| dlkf wrote:
| I implore everyone reading this to google the Sokal hoax before
| decide whether these guys are worthwhile.
| netbioserror wrote:
| The content committed to print needs to be worth it. I'm a fan of
| old-school sci-fi, the kind that asks how technology might
| enhance or undermine the human experience and how that might
| change, collapse, or raise society to new heights. Right now, the
| entire genre is in trough of unimaginative, vacuous current-day
| allegory. Most published work is entirely wrapped up in gender,
| sex, race, and labor politics. Everything is a stand-in for
| current political movements and figures, where the setting may as
| well be set-dressing. No curiosity, no prescience, no fundamental
| philosophical questioning.
|
| My only reprieve is that sci-fi short story omnibuses contain
| maybe 20-30% true sci-fi that's exactly what I'm searching for.
| But buying a print novel off the shelf got to the point where it
| was wasting my money. And I can only re-read the classics so
| much.
|
| Waiting for the "sci-fi was always current-day allegory!"
| sophomorists to flood the comments.
| rexpop wrote:
| Sci-fi _was_ always a current-day allegory. That 's why I
| prefer cyberpunk: rather than allegorical, it tries to be
| literal and concrete.
|
| But cyberpunk is not imaginative in the way you're looking for.
| I can appreciate that.
|
| What are some examples of the old-school, non-allegorical
| stuff? Maybe _Exhalation_?
| dlkf wrote:
| There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate
| information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies
| are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of
| bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a
| crisis don't have a principled argument as to how things are
| worse.
| djbusby wrote:
| I frequently hear there are more lies and they spread even
| faster in 2024 than 2014 and for sure faster than 1994.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| Boring article. How does it go from blaming computers in general
| and then just picking on Twitter and Reddit - as if these two
| websites are representative of everything a computer is used for.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm skeptical there is any epistemological collapse. Checking
| Wikipedia because I'm rusty on that stuff, it has epistemology as
| "the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and
| limits of knowledge." As someone old enough to have been reading
| paper books pre internet I don't think that's collapsed at all.
| The very fact that I can look it up on Wikipedia and reference
| Reddit is a step forward.
|
| The article reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes 'Academia here I
| come' (Reddit reference:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...)
| bargainbot3k wrote:
| China will need a large and ideally uneducated labor force in the
| coming decades so I'm not too worried about this. Reading isn't
| an essential requirement of such a job.
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