[HN Gopher] What's happening to reading?
___________________________________________________________________
What's happening to reading?
Author : Kaibeezy
Score : 116 points
Date : 2025-07-13 10:16 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| https://archive.ph/95Zyw
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to
| normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of
| people who can read just didn't need because... they can read.
|
| Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.
| genewitch wrote:
| there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago
| that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them
| into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i
| lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era,
| also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had
| purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something,
| can hardly remember.
|
| I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple
| of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a
| document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a
| summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For me chat with a paragraph in a language I sorta know
| (Japanese) or wish I knew (Chinese) is really useful. I ask
| for a translation and see discordances with what I can read
| and ask about them and get good answers. I also can lean on
| translations from my text and insist that certain words get
| used, etc.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good
| until they enshittified it slowly.
| genewitch wrote:
| thankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not
| affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux,
| mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing
| a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i
| have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever
| isn't as good as it was in the past.
|
| Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document
| database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did
| Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was
| real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even
| if windows still allows searching within files (it probably
| does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.
| kqr wrote:
| > I have no idea how it worked.
|
| I traced down this through an academic article which
| favourably compared it to other summarising solutions back in
| 2006. It might help answer the question: https://web.archive.
| org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copern...
| xphilter wrote:
| I can't read it (lol) due to paywall, but 100% it's because we
| stopped teaching kids how to read. But good luck trying to hold
| public schools accountable!
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/readin...
| nottorp wrote:
| The article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even
| before "AI".
|
| Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Sorry but if we can't correlate learning to read with
| literacy we're not allowed to correlate anything at all.
| Comprehension is massive and the difference between college
| and 6th great reading comprehension is an ocean that
| influences whether people pick anything up or pass it to
| ChatGPT.
| hluska wrote:
| Sorry but that's still not relevant. The article takes a
| totally different view on what's happening. Other sides
| could be valid too but they're not part of the article.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Oh dang, we were all worried about time traveling AI, right?
| xphilter wrote:
| Right. But you don't think the giant education gap right
| before AI isn't the primary reason?
| niux wrote:
| Just install Bypass Paywalls Clean extension. This is the
| author: https://x.com/Magnolia1234B
| coliveira wrote:
| Agreed that society deciding to "educate" children with iPads
| instead of books would lead to unforeseen consequences for
| their cognitive skills.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't know, maybe putting a paygate in front of every piece of
| substantive editorial content isn't helping.
| profunctor wrote:
| How do you expect them to make a living? News and magazines
| were always behind a paygate.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'd be a lot more likely to pay if they didn't do everything
| possible to make the experience unpleasant.
|
| Even if you pay you still get served ads, bombarded with
| trackers, and half the time publications make unsubscribing
| incredibly hostile (if not impossible online).
|
| It's no wonder half the population gets their news solely
| from reshared headlines on social media.
| thepryz wrote:
| I haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I
| went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a
| paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story
| available to listen to instead.
| floatingtorch wrote:
| In the age of LLMs vacuuming up all content and deriving all
| the economic value from it, can you blame them?
| mNovak wrote:
| Sites like the New Yorker have had pay walls since before
| LLMs entered the scene, and moreover they purposely make
| their content available freely to those web crawlers that are
| supposedly robbing them (hence why archive links work).
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| There are few youtube channels where host reads lot of
| publications on a particular current topic and gives his
| opinion summarizing the articles. This way news publications
| don't get monetary benefits but the youtube channel does.
| People who are just lazy to read will invariably gravitate to
| such methods of consuming news. I remember there was an article
| where one account was shared among the whole institution. It's
| exactly that but at a much wider scale. I expect crack down on
| fair use by such publications on those news channel.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I don't see how they can crack down on this. Summaries don't
| infringe copyright, from what I can tell.
| coliveira wrote:
| I don't blame these people. I like to read things that
| matter; but reading news, especially the way they're badly
| written these days, is better avoided.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This article, and the New Yorker in general, seem like a good
| reason why people aren't reading.
|
| If you want to _KNOW_ "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're
| better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or
| ChatGPT or whatever.
|
| If, instead, you want to _READ ABOUT_ "What's Happening to
| Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an
| elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this
| kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you.
|
| Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy
| or artificially busy with social media and other things that
| aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| I don't think you read the article at all...
| easterncalculus wrote:
| One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on
| their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous
| opening of "Bleak House"; this is a little like assessing
| swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.
|
| WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not
| asking swimmers to go through molasses.
| bmiekre wrote:
| This gave a literal LOL
| easterncalculus wrote:
| I definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets
| worse too.
|
| "Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets,
| much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom
| by husbandman and ploughboy," Dickens wrote. Claude takes a
| more direct path: "Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at
| various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun
| might appear to farmers working in misty fields."
|
| Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing
| how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they
| both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The only tricky thing about the Dickens bit is that it uses
| that archaic meaning of "divers" that I'm only familiar
| with because of the Joanna Newsom time
| travel/romance/trench warfare/birds album.
| jazzypants wrote:
| God, I'm so happy I saw this live in concert. She is
| incredible.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| "AI can't understand this metaphor" isn't criticizing the
| thing you think it's criticizing.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Comparison is not metaphor. Ironically metaphor is
| actually something LLMs are somewhat adept at picking up
| on provided there's enough training data saying there's a
| metaphor there, for a seminal work.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Whatever you may wish to call it, simile or metaphor,
| it's a little silly to complain about it being referred
| to as a metaphor, considering that similes are a subset
| of metaphor, even if they often aren't taught this way to
| children. Also, in common speech and literature, what
| would be taught as similes to children are almost
| universally just referred to as metaphors.
| AudiomaticApp wrote:
| I don't see what's missing from Claude's summary. Claude
| doesn't repeat the word "loom", but does explain that
| Dickens is comparing the appearance of the lamps to that of
| the sun.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| "A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of
| a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring
| under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery,
| though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which
| point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction),
| was almost immaculate."
|
| Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded
| asides/commentary
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP
| anzumitsu wrote:
| That's the preface, the study in question dealt with the
| opening of Chapter 1
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| I like it
|
| "London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord
| Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable
| November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the
| waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,
| and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty
| feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up
| Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making
| a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
| full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might
| imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable
| in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very
| blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas
| in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their
| foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of
| other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since
| the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits
| to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points
| tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound
| interest."
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as
| the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority
| of people to be able to read this?
| falcor84 wrote:
| I for one absolutely agree that
|
| reading this : reading books intended for transmitting
| information = swimming through molasses : swimming
| through water
| KPGv2 wrote:
| It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The
| analogy is either a failure or an insult.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Is it? Syrup is swimmable:
| https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
| haiku2077 wrote:
| Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously
| deadly when it floods.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
| jcranmer wrote:
| I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what
| "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in
| there that require some familiarity with things
| commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the
| 21st century.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is,
| but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it
| is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden
| with overlapping context clues.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Per Wikipedia, Michaelmas term tends to around in mid-
| December, not in mid-November.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Well then I guess it was an unseasonably warm December
| that year? Or perhaps the dates have changed? Regardless,
| I'm not at all convinced that it makes a significant
| difference to the story.
| hluska wrote:
| It's a helpful detail that Dickens wrote for his
| Victorian readers. Michaelmas term refers to both the
| first academic term of the school year and the start of
| the legal year in the English courts system. Bleak House
| is about a court case that has gone on so long that
| nobody knows what it's about. The case is about an
| inheritance and has dragged on for so long that the
| estate itself has been totally wiped out by legal fees.
| It has ruined lives and continues to ruin them but there
| is no end in sight even though there's nothing left but
| fighting to fight over. It's an inherited lawsuit and an
| inherited feud.
|
| Dickens had a lot of issues with the legal system at the
| time and it was a protest work.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > nothing left but fighting to fight over
|
| Toward the end of the story the fighting does stop when
| lawyer's fees, which they had been charging to the
| estate, at last empty it. This is announced publicly in
| court, and the attorneys respond by flinging their piles
| of paper into the air, one of a few comic scenes in the
| novel.
|
| FYA, this modus vivendi is still being practiced -- see
| the litigation around the estate of O.J. Simpson.
| andoando wrote:
| How does November help? I don't even remember the
| academic terms from my college 10 years ago, how am I
| supposed to accurately know how academic terms worked a
| century ago in England?
| Zedseayou wrote:
| One example student in the study does not look it up and
| misinterprets "Michaelmas Term" as a person, presumably
| because it has "Michael" in it. Knowing it is even a time
| is half the battle.
| SamBam wrote:
| They were given a dictionary, and also told they were
| allowed to look things up on their phone.
|
| I suspect that the unfamiliarity with words like
| Michaelmas was part of the _point_.
|
| I.e. What do the students do when reading a book and they
| come across a word they don't know? Look it up? Deduce
| it's rough meaning from context? Live with the
| uncertainty? Get mad and not finish the text?
| mkehrt wrote:
| I'm pretty sure "Michaelmas term" is just a Britishism
| sill in use today.
| layer8 wrote:
| The explanation is nowadays just a tap-and-hold away,
| however, on a mobile device.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| ... I guessed it was about some prime minister term
| ending, maybe he got voted out, or he wasn't elected in
| his constituency again.
|
| In my defence, I'm not a native speaker
| KPGv2 wrote:
| As would I. It actually feels very "chat-ish." Two-word
| thoughts as sentences, etc.
|
| Like how I text. To my wife. Whenever we're on our
| computers in different locations. No need to edit. She
| gets it. So do you.
| mschild wrote:
| Anecdata: I found most people don't have an issue with
| the vocabulary itself but rather their attention spans.
| From what I've experienced from family members and
| friends, the younger ones seem to get exasperated by any
| longer amount of text that isn't in very simple English
| language.
|
| A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that
| could actually sit through a whole reading session in her
| 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose
| books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
| Teever wrote:
| I think it's very reasonable to expect that a majority
| (if not all) of university students to be able to read
| this but certainly not the general public.
|
| You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's
| ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary
| necessary to parse this piece of text.
| jerf wrote:
| The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of
| students talking through what they think the passage
| means.
|
| In fact I feel I should remind you before you start
| reading it, even though the study also starts with this,
| that the subject of this study is not the population at
| large but specifically _English majors in college_. Not
| the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In
| the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive
| sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed
| the reality, but I'm not moving them.
|
| [1]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
| andoando wrote:
| I guess I would not have done much better.
|
| >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among
| green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it
| rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the
| waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
|
| >Facilitator: >O.K.
|
| >Subject: >There's just fog everywhere.
|
| What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and
| this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they
| want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal
| fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the
| city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what
| much is there to say about it?
| lelandfe wrote:
| Without reading the paper... There seems to be fog
| everywhere - but it's the beautiful and natural fog of
| London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution.
| The use of "great" is interesting because it seems like
| the city was about to be presented as "bad." But there's
| more to it.
| photonthug wrote:
| First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It
| gets around.
|
| Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and
| natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices,
| who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective?
| Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility
| / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other
| stuff besides fog gets around.
|
| Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter
| into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and
| commercial activity, they can become unclean.
|
| Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing:
| What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an
| overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once
| clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all
| the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping
| go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man
| be able find his heart?
| jazzypants wrote:
| That's not unreadable, it's captivating!
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Short sentences, too. Some people like to ramble on for
| quite a few lines before reaching for a period.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| So it opens with a tone poem.
|
| Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve
| their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
| colinwilyb wrote:
| When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your
| attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain
| pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as
| the fragments become a whole.
|
| The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination
| placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the
| mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very
| unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a
| Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a
| better picture.
|
| On another note: What are horse blinkers?
| mrob wrote:
| Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous
| Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and
| first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up
| with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the
| readers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs
|
| The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a
| Megalosaurus:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-
| _Cry...
|
| Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field
| of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely
| to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have
| been familiar with them, because they were commonly used
| with horses pulling carriages.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Summarizers will shorten this to something like "It was
| very muddy in London." Very lossy compression.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard
| to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I
| can get the gist looking at it.
|
| Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought
| would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need
| to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished
| and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much
| and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some
| prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of
| me would say it's a street, English naming is weird.
|
| Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is
| retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a
| dreary picture.
|
| Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my
| comprehension.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a
| British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently
| also means the beginning of the legal year.
| ryandv wrote:
| I still don't see the issue. Do people really have
| difficulty reading this level of English?
| pitpatagain wrote:
| The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the
| opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very
| vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the
| archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at
| from context.
|
| Is it the easiest thing to read? No.
|
| Should _university English majors_ be able to read it? Good
| grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
| zapw wrote:
| Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is
| just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which
| suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the
| article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the
| first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are
| definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the
| later paragraphs.
| andrepd wrote:
| Lmao, this is the "swimming through molasses"? We're done
| for.
|
| I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has
| destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs
| are on their way to destroy what's left.
| AlanYx wrote:
| There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't
| apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens
| was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part,
| that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever
| to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy
| writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are
| probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded,
| circuitous style of the court.
| anzumitsu wrote:
| Have you read the passage in question? While I would expect
| English students to be able to work through it it's not an easy
| task and would almost certainly require some kind of reference
| for the anachronistic terms and historical context (which,
| admittedly, I think the students in the study were allowed,
| though few took advantage of it).
| haiku2077 wrote:
| Someone posted it below and it doesn't seem that difficult.
| One old use of the word "wonderful" was all that threw me off
| neuroplots wrote:
| Even worse, there are a lot of writers I know who go through
| the publishing process and the first person to actually read
| the manuscript is the copy editor. You'd think people in
| publishing read, but no...
|
| A landmark study of this, pertaining to literary agents, was
| just published today:
| https://antipodes.substack.com/p/literary-agents-dont-read-h...
| troad wrote:
| Strong agree, and honestly I'm kind of shocked.
|
| If an adult English speaker cannot understand the opening of
| Bleak House - quotes given elsewhere in this thread - they are
| effectively unable to access the bulk of English literature.
|
| This is not someone who belongs in a university English course,
| this is someone in need of remedial English lessons.
| Spivak wrote:
| It really is, students were asked to read a passage in what
| could be reasonably called a dialect of English that they don't
| read, write, or speak; that makes reference and uses turns of
| phrase that would be well-understood by readers at the time but
| are archaic to a modern reader.
|
| If you did that same exact passage but had someone
| transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" ->
| "pedestrians" I bet the results would be perfectly acceptable.
| Why would you test literacy, a very practical skill, using
| anything other than contemporary language, the kind that they
| actually use in their day to day?
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > students were asked to read a passage in what could be
| reasonably called a dialect of English
|
| They were asked to read the opening chapter of Bleak House.
| It's pretty much standard English.
|
| > LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord
| Chancellor sitting in Lincolns Inn Hall. Implacable November
| weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but
| newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be
| wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so,
| waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke
| lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,
| with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes
| gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the
| sun.
|
| The only word I see there that isn't used the same way in bog
| standard American English is "wonderful." I will grant you
| that "Michaelmas" is obscure to an American, but "Michaelmas
| Term [] over" is clear enough: it's a specific span of time
| that has elapsed. You don't need to know exactly what
| "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is any more than if you read
|
| > I went to Carnegie Deli
|
| and didn't know what Carnigie Deli is. It's obviously a deli.
| zapw wrote:
| To understand the passage and what follows, it is actually
| important to know what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is. And to be
| clear, it's not an "inn" in the standard modern usage of
| the term, but rather a rather a professional association
| for lawyers.
| allturtles wrote:
| You can figure out from later context that it's some kind
| of legal institution with an associated court. The
| students were also allowed to look things up:
| "Facilitators also provided subjects with access to
| online resources and dictionaries and told them that they
| could also use their own cell phones as a resource" [0]
|
| [0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
| zapw wrote:
| Yes, agreed completely. You can get a lot (but not
| everything) from context. The text will be clearer if you
| look up unfamiliar terms (which they were allowed to do).
| But if you gloss over Lincoln's Inn Hall as "obviously
| some kind of inn", you won't have a full understanding of
| what follows.
| Zedseayou wrote:
| Unfortunately, from the study, most of the subjects had
| no idea there was anything to do with a court or lawyers
| by the end of the passages at all.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > Why would you test literacy
|
| To clarify, the study [0] mentioned in TFA and referenced by
| GP did not test literacy in the sense, "can this person read
| English?" Rather, it tested whether students had attained a
| level of "proficient-prose literacy," which equates to a
| score of 33+ on the Reading portion of the ACT.
|
| A 33 on the ACT is a very good score (it's out of 36). The
| students were English majors, so it does not seem
| unreasonable to test whether they are proficient in this
| area. What exactly is the expectation when they pick up King
| Lear, or The Canterbury Tales?
|
| 0: https://archive.ph/Cp0rS
| easterncalculus wrote:
| This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been
| true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or
| 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure
| was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything
| it was harder since students now _should_ have a better
| education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as
| if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characters
| do, which isn 't true either. They had trouble then too, but
| (fewer) people could still do it. Now it's a stone wall.
|
| Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road
| signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger
| text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives
| is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes
| better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the
| study was measuring English students, so reading is quite
| literally their occupation for at least those four years.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| > Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to
| parse then as it is now
|
| This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer
| with common readers.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Yes, he was popular, and his works still weren't as easy
| to read as some of his contemporaries and many authors
| before and after him. That's not nonsense, that's
| reality.
| allturtles wrote:
| How are these statements contradictory?
| easterncalculus wrote:
| They aren't. A run-on, 70 word sentence for example
| wasn't easier to store in your head, or not require the
| occasional second read-through back then . Readers then
| still had to go through all of that. This "it's just
| outdated" idea is employed primarily to hand-wave poor
| literacy performance and reading requirements.
|
| Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and has a lot of the
| same difficulty, but people don't call it 'outdated' or
| treat it like a foreign language. These are just books
| you have to read slower than a news article, and that's
| alright, but there's a fine line between needing more
| time and not being able to get through it. That study
| showed it conclusively.
| Spivak wrote:
| Right but we're mixing things
|
| * Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and
| understand its meaning?
|
| * Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated
| grammatical structures?
|
| * Does the reader know a bunch of archaic terms and phrases
| that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as
| historic context of the work necessary to grok references
| that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?
|
| To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how
| well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose
| and actively confuses the measurement of what you want
| which is the first and second. It's been a minute but I
| remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a
| much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than
| college freshmen are illiterate.
|
| An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their
| studies as a means to better understand specific works but
| it's not a virtue unto itself.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Wait until they encounter Shakespeare!
| jihadjihad wrote:
| It reminds me of the now-infamous article that ran in the New
| York Times a few years ago that argued we should remove the
| requirement to complete an Algebra course in order to earn a
| high school diploma.
|
| The bar for any amount of academic discipline or rigor may as
| well be a stripe of masking tape on the floor.
| allturtles wrote:
| Not just university students, but _English majors_ [0].
|
| [0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
|
| It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our
| subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of
| the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52
| percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author
| or title on their own."
| jihadjihad wrote:
| To add to the depression, I wonder how many respondents
| thought that "nineteenth century" == 1900s.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Ain't It Awful
| rdlw wrote:
| Wow, this really makes me think. Thanks for making that up
| and commenting it.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Yep, English majors, and on top of that the study was done in
| 2015, which is not just pre-ChatGPT but pre-TikTok.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think I could name many 19'th century engineers, and
| my list will quickly start to include folks who are more
| mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage
| that we literally use equations named after these guys!
|
| Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is... it
| happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.
| bregma wrote:
| Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Gustav Eiffel? Robert Stephenson?
| Nikola Tesla? Alexander Graham Bell? Orville and Wilbur
| Wright? Thomas Edison?
|
| I guess it depends on how much you honour those who lit the
| way before you.
| bee_rider wrote:
| FWIW I (incorrectly, I guess) thought of Tesla and Edison
| as early 20'th century instead of 19'th.
|
| The Wright brothers just barely squeeze by the "19'th
| century" bar.
| Izkata wrote:
| Ignoring the first three, the rest I've mentally bucketed
| into "inventor" and not "engineer". And that's assuming I
| have them associated with the right century - definitely
| would have excluded the Wright brothers anyway because of
| that.
| allturtles wrote:
| > I don't think I could name many 19'th century engineers
|
| Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum
| in high school is built around reading particular works by
| particular historical writers. The highlights of
| nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered
| in high school (and beyond - some of these people are
| seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember
| any works or authors from the nineteenth century would be
| equivalent to engineering major who can't remember any
| algebra.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess that's true.
|
| Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of
| course)--I tutored folks in an "math for non-stem majors"
| sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it
| generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer
| to their material than the math students, who'd all long
| ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point
| they started asking about foils, which was pretty
| confusing (they weren't looking for anachronistically
| named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or
| preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic
| for applying the distributive property twice, which I'd
| never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing
| directly.
|
| I wonder if these college English students have similarly
| forgotten some names? I guess that's sort of a long shot.
| I do think memorization of facts should be avoided,
| though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the
| underlying principle into your mental model instead.
| aorist wrote:
| This study can't see past its own midwit view that there is
| an objective "detailed, literal" reading that necessarily
| produces the same interpretation of the text that the authors
| have.
|
| The students in the study are responding in a rational way to
| the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're
| deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these
| interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent
| that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their
| own work[^1]. The _real_ task is then to flatter the teacher
| /professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work -- and
| if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective,
| why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?
|
| This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself: -
| one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs
| lumbering around London", because the authors think this
| language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally
| plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only
| describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first
| descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced,
| there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as
| developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or
| making fun of) that idea? - the authors criticize readers for
| relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words
| in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only
| one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it
| more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is
| correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage
| instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other
| texts, especially old ones -- does pulling from those make
| you a bad reader? - they say that a student only locates the
| fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the
| shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only
| described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and
| never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is
| instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as
| is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More
| pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If
| not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than
| shipyards?)
|
| I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is
| always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly
| correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text
| itself. But by the points students are in college they will
| have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal
| interpretations that don't produce the required result, and
| unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of
| understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.
|
| [^0] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-
| the-... [^1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-
| tests-are-so-bad...
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, the opening is exactly the sort of clunky writing
| paragraph that you can normally feel free to skip.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| They were not asked to read a book, they were asked to read 7
| paragraphs aloud and then answer questions about it. It would
| have been nice if the study had a control group of students who
| sat down and read the same passage to themselves, we interpret
| for different things when reading aloud and we have no idea how
| that affected the study but for the study's purpose of
| highlighting issues with teaching (not proving students are
| illiterate) the lack of this control group is not a huge issue.
|
| English students are students, they are in school to learn
| things they don't know, not demonstrate what they already know.
| Looking at the numbers it goes from 0% proficient as freshman
| to 50% as juniors, drops with seniors but seniors often seem to
| be an outlier in these sorts of studies, probably because they
| have a great deal on their mind with the major changes their
| life is about to undergo.
| bmiekre wrote:
| Sign up for Libby, get free New Yorker articles from library.
| Remember libraries?
| retskrad wrote:
| Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have
| hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less
| people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is
| exhausting when you didn't grow up with books. After 500 hours, I
| can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling
| comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and
| dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and
| social media's quick hits lose their appeal.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Your comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of
| someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about
| your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of
| reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're
| willing to share.
| edavison1 wrote:
| I don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the
| sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer
| generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.
| debesyla wrote:
| I wonder how can one even calculate time spent reading in
| hours. Most of reading is, after all, thinking (and
| reminiscing) about what you read...
|
| I think maybe OP was using some obscure meme format. Or if it
| was genuine I am also interested how did the 500 hours came
| upon.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| It's trivial to get an LLM to write a comment of this kind of
| quality. Good writing means nothing anymore.
| sandy_coyote wrote:
| Despite this comment's dubiety, this is a good point. Text
| communication is only about 8,000 years old IIRC, which is
| quite recent in human development.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| You can knock off a few millennia there, and if you want to
| include most of the population, barely a century or two.
|
| Literacy was needed to read the Bible and operate machinery,
| and now we have videos for that. Only (some of) the video
| makers need to read, so they can raid the libraries for
| material.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Now ask how old working a sedentary 9-5 is
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Well, when I was a kid in the 80s in communist Romania, life was
| a lot similar to 19th century than what someone in Western
| countries was experiencing. No TV (obviously no computers), so
| most significant form of entertainment came from reading
| primarily. I never read "classics" or the books that were on
| school's compulsory list but I did read anything I could get my
| hands on and looked entertaining. I recall seeing the movie
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065207/ first time, some time after
| the fall of communism and invasion of cable TV and thinking, "I
| know this story!" because I read the book like 5 times, without
| knowing there's a movie too.
|
| Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's
| being replaced by video content as primary source of
| entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not
| practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much)
| reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not
| exceeding that.
| ssttoo wrote:
| Similar experience in neighboring Bulgaria. I remember my dad
| being upset with me for wasting my time reading "readable
| little books" (my best effort at approx. translation) meaning
| fiction, as opposed to proper textbooks.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Times have changed. My kid and the kids of every friend I
| know around me, have never opened a book on their own
| volition. Ever. Although they open the phone, tablet and
| laptop many times a day.
|
| And it's not like they're stupid or anything, just have no
| desire to read, never learned to associate reading with
| something pleasurable.
|
| But ... it shows. Like a friend has a kid who took the
| national exam that marks the end of secondary school
| (gymnasium) this year. He told me one question that was
| asked. Basically a conversation between John and George, John
| asking "George, will you start working or continue wasting
| your time doing nothing?", and George replies: "Right now I'm
| going to get the scissors to cut some leaves for the dogs".
| Question was, "What will George do? a) Start working or b)
| Continue wasting his time".
|
| Kid chose "a) Start working" because as he argued, he goes
| after scissors and uses them to cut leaves, which is work.
| Asked my kid the same question, got the same answer: he'll
| start working. Well, but if they would have read a few books,
| they would have encountered the Romanian expression "cutting
| leaves to the dogs" as an idiom for laziness, lack of work,
| doing nothing. So they don't read anymore and it shows.
| yesfitz wrote:
| This article provides a lot to think about.
|
| To paraphrase some ideas poorly:
|
| > _" LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers
| (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be
| summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."_
|
| > _" An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool
| for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are
| capable of love) fill this role for each other."_
|
| The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to
| see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of
| Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should
| have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace
| AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI
| skeptics like myself.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty
| is part of the importance.
|
| It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent
| demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries _never_ fully
| capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the
| Cliff 's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read
| the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away
| might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and
| butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract
| little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.
| androng wrote:
| Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and
| "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not
| Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the
| book and just never put it into my own words so I forget
| everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times.
| there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the
| article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the
| effort.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog
| posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a
| result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove
| whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point
| people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading
| books like those, _deciding_ to read a self-help book for
| example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick.
| Most of them are interchangeable. They 're meant to make you
| think you're improving yourself by reading them. (Dalio is more
| trying to position himself as master of the universe.)
|
| Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book
| length because their arguments and stories (and characters)
| require that book length to reach their full potential.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the
| universe
|
| Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill
| isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but
| running a hedge fund.
| jollyllama wrote:
| I'd be intrigued to hear the argument fully flushed out for
| once. The Dalio worship after the "principles" exposes is
| baffling but at the same time he does appear objectively
| successful.
| bigthymer wrote:
| I think his game is no longer about developing analytical
| skill to be the best investor, but becoming the person
| who has access to high level people and gets actionable
| information on an international scale before others.
| jghn wrote:
| I added that genre to popular science books as things on which
| I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're
| just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much
| redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers.
|
| And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So
| Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The
| hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never
| be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly
| the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me.
| Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt
| it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better
| person.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The real red pill is realizing that Jared Diamond's "guns,
| germs, and steel" was no more accurate or historical than the
| shit that Foucault was writing 30 years before
| ralfd wrote:
| The real red pill is always in the comments/blog posts:
|
| https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-
| pet...
|
| > You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as
| a reply to a man named Yali, a "remarkable local
| politician" whom Diamond encountered while walking on the
| beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. > Yali asked a
| question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling
| down to something like, "Why did human development proceed
| at such different rates on different continents?" (Which is
| of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But
| that's not actually the way Yali put it, and his real
| question -- indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating
| in its own right -- suggests a whole 'nother set of answers
| > [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history.
| If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a
| prestige cable drama
| mindwok wrote:
| Many non fiction books are too long, I agree. But there's also
| something lost when you treat these books as "extract lesson as
| fast as possible and move on". There's a joy sometimes in
| engaging with the material and taking your time.
| molsongolden wrote:
| I need to read books like this with extra intentionality or it
| all just flows through and I might retain a couple of key
| concepts if I'm lucky.
|
| 1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners
| to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping
| through later.
|
| 2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the
| end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on
| what I just read and to summarize the core message of the
| chapter.
| Havoc wrote:
| Noticed this in myself. Number of books read per year absolutely
| cratered even while I'd say I'm reading more words in raw
| quantity
| bilater wrote:
| too long - anyone has the tldr?
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun "almost every
| day" fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.
|
| Haha. Liars. Less than one percent, tops.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you
| find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will
| supercharge this.
|
| New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to
| a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if
| some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more
| people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter
| Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books.
|
| To a certain extent, translations which play with the
| presentation and complexity of the text have already been around
| for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the
| Bible.
|
| Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite
| delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology.
|
| Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's
| The Road To Reality.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > New modalities of presentation will make media more
| accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn
| from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation.
|
| I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing
| the possibility that specific expression of an idea _is_ the
| modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren
| 't just losing some magic. You're losing the _entire point_.
| nsriv wrote:
| Exactly this. On the less artistic side, I've seen so many
| critiques of popular self-help books for being anecdote heavy
| and people sharing (or even selling!) summaries of the key
| bullet points, and the whole point is to develop a resonance
| with the author to drive home the point. Otherwise it's now
| just a listicle.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Most people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea
| was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you
| realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom
| science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and
| aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From
| Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek
| fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you
| are doing and they get testy when you point it out.
| dasil003 wrote:
| One of the beautiful things about the human experience is
| that there can be multiple points. The greatest works of
| art can be appreciated in many ways, and the viewer's
| perspective can add a lot of richness that goes beyond the
| original intent. Even in a standard white collar work
| environment where we want to make single points very
| crisply there is a real art to framing things and choosing
| the right words to motivate different individuals with
| different contexts to do the right things to row the boat
| in the same direction.
|
| I think AI is useful for sifting through high volumes of
| data to get the gist, but I don't really count it as it's
| own modality. It is by definition a watered down version of
| the training data that produced it, it lacks the human
| spark that makes content worthy of attention and analysis.
| Tronno wrote:
| Not everyone "misses" the point. People can take what they
| want and choose to discard the rest. Consider, for example,
| watching beach volleyball not for the thrill of the sport
| but to ogle the players. That they're also engaged in
| serious competition is not lost on anyone - the audience
| just doesn't care.
|
| Some authoritarians also like vigilante violence and find
| it in The Punisher. Some racists also like futuristic
| fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work
| don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored
| because it doesn't match their worldview.
|
| Many people are perfectly capable of getting e.g. the
| moods, visuals, themes, ideas conveyed by poetry, and it
| simply doesn't match their taste. That doesn't make them
| morons, and to imply otherwise is snobbery.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in
| Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their
| heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match
| their worldview.
|
| I can enjoy fiction that doesn't match my worldview...
| and it doesn't change my worldview. I am immune to
| propaganda without the inability to appreciate it, or
| temporarily be entertained by it. And it has fascinated
| me my entire life that others must be molded into
| something new from fiction, or run screaming from it with
| their ears plugged up with nothing in between.
|
| Perhaps the rest of you can do this too, and you're
| merely being ungenerous in your assumption that those
| whose politics you disagree with have so little
| psychological fortitude that they're incapable of the
| same. Or maybe you can't, and it scares you that they
| can.
| watwut wrote:
| > Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it
| in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their
| heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match
| their worldview.
|
| Everyone does that. In star trek, race determines your
| temperament and skills. You do not see many calm Klingon
| scientists anywhere outside of their planet. Start Trek
| is also, basically, about humans being overall morally
| superior.
|
| You can see whatever you want to see in the star trek.
| ahamilton454 wrote:
| This was a pretty thoughtful piece and a pleasure to read. My gut
| reaction at first was that it was going to be some critque on
| children not reading due to generative ai (a cynial piece), but
| it was quite an interesting reflection on simply how reading is
| changing from the prepective of this author whose spent a his
| life deeply reading books
|
| The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.
| dsign wrote:
| Once upon a time, reading and books were for the elites. The
| printing press and the Enlightenment changed that and, time
| passed, we got other forms of entertainment that required less
| and less mental investment. Now anybody can choose to inflict
| themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen.
| Maybe touching the inner mind of high-flying human thinkers will
| become a thing for the elites again, with the silver lining that
| access to books will be slightly less about how golden is one's
| cradle.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-
| Trump mental acumen
|
| If you read enough books, you'll reach "vote-for-Trump mental
| acumen" again, if nothing else just to rile up the semi-
| literates.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an
| obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward.
| Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of
| being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one's
| peril.
|
| On the other it's those of us who've read in the old school
| style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the
| opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the
| worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false
| impression of understanding where there is none.
|
| Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English
| majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what
| they're talking about, which just goes to show that people who
| were going to read will do it regardless of what else is
| happening in their life, and people who weren't going to read
| will not read even if it's their major. In this sense, LLMs don't
| really change anything. The same person operating the tool will
| continue to be the same person in either case.
| compacct27 wrote:
| Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels
| more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles
| have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of
| like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And
| now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful
| outcome.
|
| Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when
| things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance,
| crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are
| now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-
| knowledge
| yannyu wrote:
| It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the
| person you're responding to.
|
| "Reading" an article through its comments makes the
| assumption that those commenting actually read and understood
| the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an
| entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough
| to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less
| knowledge of the content or field.
|
| How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential
| comment about some piece of media that you've never even
| seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes
| are completely intelligible across the internet even though
| many people have never actually seen them.
|
| I think the argument of the person that you're responding to
| is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools
| that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always
| been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and
| consume them.
|
| The assumption that long form content is a relic and that
| reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely
| crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset
| that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems
| logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour,
| then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be
| deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I
| work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is
| all you need to be an expert in something.
| bumby wrote:
| I think this comment mistakes "understanding the plot" as the
| main goal of reading, but misses that reading (as a process,
| a verb) can be the goal in itself, at least in terms of
| recreational reading. Summarization misses all that
| experience, just like reading the synopsis of a movie isn't
| the same as viewing the art. I don't want everything in my
| life to be just a rush to the ends, anymore than I'd want to
| trade the human experience of hugging my child to be reduced
| to simply understanding "an increase in reading oxytocin
| creates bonding leading to higher resource investment and
| survivability."
|
| A rush to "get to the point" when dealing with art feels very
| much like the tech-obsessed productivity porn that can miss
| the forest for the trees.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I think this comment mistakes "understanding the plot" as
| the main goal of reading
|
| Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through.
| Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a
| subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those
| effects is where a literary-level read starts.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| "No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as
| it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to
| reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every
| moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I
| feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are
| unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether
| to live them."
|
| Alan Watts
| blargey wrote:
| Conversely (or a corollary?), comparing one's prose to a
| _symphony_ is considered a...unusually high bar to meet.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _It 's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I
| wanted all along._"
|
| A passage from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" springs
| immediately to mind.
|
| " _... 'Beware of first-hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the
| most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist.
| They are but the physical impressions produced by love and
| fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a
| philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible
| tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that
| disturbing element -- direct observation. Do not learn
| anything about this subject of mine -- the French Revolution.
| Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen
| thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought
| Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about
| the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great
| minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that
| were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which
| you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be
| sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in
| history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen
| must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I
| must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who
| listen to me are in a better position to judge about the
| French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in
| a better position than you, for they will learn what you
| think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to
| the chain. And in time' -- his voice rose -- 'there will come
| a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a
| generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically
| free From taint of personality, which will see the French
| Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to
| have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken
| place in the days of the Machine.'
|
| Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice
| a feeling already latent in the minds of men ..._"
|
| Or perhaps what Terry Pratchett wrote about the river Ankh
| may apply: " _Any water that had passed through so many
| kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed._ " One
| has to wonder if people are thinking " _Any idea that has
| passed through so many layers of minds has to be thoroughly
| refined indeed._ "
| asimpletune wrote:
| I mean, the insurmountable problem is - and will always be -
| that true knowledge lies beyond words. You can communicate
| and articulate and pontificate and these are all good things,
| but even at their best efforts they will never be more than a
| mechanical process that will never quite get you there. In
| other words, there will never be the right words to "get it"
| because what there is to get is fundamentally unexplainable.
|
| It's like trying to explain what one may see hear or feel
| when their on vacation at an exotic new location by talking
| about the train tracks that brought you there.
|
| So when you're reading you're not downloading packets that
| add up to some kind of point. Instead, in the absolute best
| case scenario, you're simulating the experience, according to
| the author's recommended doses, of someone else "acquiring"
| knowledge. This "someone else" is the nameless reader the
| book was written for but they are not you.
| YinglingHeavy wrote:
| Reddit is trivia porn
| tines wrote:
| I had this exact thought the other day. Social media is
| information porn. Endless amounts of empty information that
| gives you the feeling of acquiring knowledge, with none of
| the substance.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I feel this way about The News.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And also real porn.
| beloch wrote:
| Click-bait longform is where things went wrong.
|
| I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love
| reading about things that I know very little about. Books still
| generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if
| you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure
| reading.
|
| Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates
| in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to
| get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click
| isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until
| you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article
| will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds
| are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never
| return.
|
| When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform
| article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels
| like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you
| _have_ been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to
| produce abstracts of long-form articles _before_ reading them.
| It 's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form
| thieves steal your time.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to
| summarize them?
| beloch wrote:
| Click-bait. I'm not immune. I see something tantalizing and
| then I have to know. I've been burned by Hacker News more
| than once.
| homarp wrote:
| https://longreads.com/ maybe
| timeinput wrote:
| I mean I read the New Yorker OP article because it was
| posted on hacker news, and highly voted. It was probably
| too short to be considered long form, but I feel like I was
| baited into reading a rambling article where I gained
| nothing of value other than at best a summary of other
| peoples thoughts, where the only conclusion I can
| practically draw with out reading a lot more is "Joshua
| Rothman and others don't like how people are consuming
| content".
| barrkel wrote:
| And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here.
| Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went
| on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a
| decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles
| paid off.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Any good sources for longform articles?
| philipkglass wrote:
| Read this if you have time to kill:
|
| "Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of
| World War II, originally published in 1997:
|
| https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
|
| I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my
| time just pulling up the link again because it's so long
| yet compelling.
| uolmir wrote:
| One of the best! If memory serves there was a This
| American Life segment excerpted from it too
| (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/195/transcript).
| kristjansson wrote:
| They have a convention of prefacing articles with a
| category from their own taxonomy ("Personal History",
| "Shouts and Mumurs", "Reporter at Large", "Talk of the
| town", etc.) that signify the sort of article you're going
| to get. In print this works well, as the heading is
| prominent, and each type occurs in a somewhat consistent
| order in the magazine, so you have a few clues you might be
| reading a type you dislike. I worry this hasn't translated
| well to their online readership, and has contributed to a
| poorer reputation than they deserve.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I just watched Wild Ones on AppleTV, and I feel the same way
| about that series. IMDb has a tag line "Investigates the
| delicate ecosystems of our globe and finds information on how
| to help conserve and protect the most priceless endangered
| species." However, the entire thing felt more like a
| glorified influencer vlogging their vacay. It was much more
| about the camera people than the animals. I know this wasn't
| Planet Earth, but the footage they acquired was not the
| prominent bits of the series. It was produced well enough
| that I watched each episode and I was curious about each
| episode, but they all left me with the same feeling of meh
| about it.
|
| Some of these articles are definitely more about the author
| being able to say they write than it is shedding light on
| anything or providing any kind of insight. It's all just
| gross to me
| staunton wrote:
| Objections:
|
| - it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the
| fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy,
| doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's
| possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended
| meaning in claiming otherwise.
|
| - It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's
| own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an
| overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is _applying_ the
| knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity
| of reading.
|
| - One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly
| influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for
| pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young,
| but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The pace of advancement in human civilization, expecially in
| science and technology (and all the conveniences and economic
| multipliers that have resulted) was very slow until literacy
| became widespread.
|
| Before most people could read, you would learn a trade from
| your father or as an apprentice. Knowledge was handed down
| but you pretty much learned "the way it has always been done"
| and improvements were slow.
|
| Once we all could learn from books and publish our
| discoveries, the spread of knowledge and the pace of
| advancement exploded. We went from farming with animal labor
| to walking on the moon in under a century.
| staunton wrote:
| Agreed. Does any of that contradict something I wrote?
| prerok wrote:
| Well, education researchers are trying to communicate that
| knowledge is never "transferred".
|
| IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two
| problems:
|
| 1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy
| their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case.
| The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but
| the brain in the student is making its own connections and
| tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may
| click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way,
| leading to learning a different lesson from the one being
| taught.
|
| 2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they
| have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers
| don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present
| in their students.
|
| So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right
| word for it.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| A great perspective but one problem remains: AI will radically
| change the book market. Great new books will be even harder to
| find as we are drowning in a sea of words. How do we stay
| afloat?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are more great books written before 2022 than a person
| could read in a lifetime. Stick with those.
| chickensong wrote:
| Seek out book enthusiasts, which in some ways (tools,
| internet), is easier than ever, and find your tribe(s) that
| align with your taste. AI or not, the volume of books is ever
| increasing. Word of mouth, personal recommendations, curated
| lists, all are only increasing in value.
| jiehong wrote:
| Just like you wouldn't summarise a poem.
| xandrius wrote:
| Roses are coloured.
|
| Rhyming ending.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Alternative summary of Roses Are Red: Love, simplicity,
| beauty, ambiguity, tradition.
|
| There are different ways of summarizing a text. Odyssey
| (another poem) could be summarized bluntly:
|
| _Homer 's The Odyssey follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on
| his perilous journey home after the Trojan War. For ten
| years, he faces trials, including the Cyclops Polyphemus,
| the witch Circe, and the deadly Sirens, while angering the
| sea god Poseidon. Meanwhile, in Ithaca, his wife Penelope
| fends off persistent suitors, awaiting his return. With the
| help of the goddess Athena, Odysseus finally returns,
| disguised as a beggar. He reveals himself, defeats the
| suitors in a contest of skill and battle, and reunites with
| Penelope._
|
| Or it can be summarized as I summarized Roses Are Red:
|
| _The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, is a richly layered
| epic that follows Odysseus' tumultuous journey home after
| the Trojan War. It explores themes of heroism, identity,
| loyalty, and human frailty through encounters with gods,
| monsters, and mortals. The narrative intertwines adventure
| with moments of introspection, revealing a tension between
| fate and agency. Penelope's endurance, Telemachus' coming-
| of-age, and Odysseus' cunning invite reflection on
| resilience and transformation. Yet, its moral ambiguities--
| violence, deception, and divine caprice--resist tidy
| resolution. The epic's power lies in its openness to
| interpretation, offering a timeless meditation on the
| complexities of human experience and the longing for home._
|
| Obviously very different approaches.
| xandrius wrote:
| Present both and you'd have a pretty decent summary of
| the Odyssey.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > people who were going to read will do it regardless of what
| else is happening in their life, and people who weren't going
| to read will not read even if it's their major. In this sense,
| LLMs don't really change anything. The same person operating
| the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.
|
| This seems extremely detached from reality. Just to give you an
| anecdotal example, I used to love reading books as a kid, but
| you'd be extremely hard pressed to find me reading one now.
| Clearly my reading habits have changed, and so it cannot be
| some intrinsic property written in my fate (which seems to be
| assumed to exist in the quoted framing).
|
| Conversely, book purchases wouldn't fall or rise, especially
| over long timeframes, if there weren't changes in reading
| habits. It just doesn't make sense to portray people as these
| immovable objects, whose desire to read has been inscribed into
| them at birth.
|
| > Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is
| an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of
| reward.
|
| When reading novels for pleasure is not among your hobbies, it
| most likely will be. You bet I don't often want to read e.g.
| documentation: I just want to get my hands on the magic
| incantations or magic phrases / values required, and move on
| with my day.
|
| But this is true even for literature class, with its mandatory
| readings. I was one of the more naive folks in my class, so I'd
| make an earnest attempt at reading through those things. At the
| end, that only mattered to the extent that I can now tell you
| it was a complete chore. And the "reward" at the end of those
| was good test scores of course - something others could
| replicate by just relying on, then manually written, summaries.
|
| > one might be left with the false impression of understanding
| where there is none.
|
| It is at most only an opinion that there is no understanding
| there, and so is that the impression the person would have
| about their understanding is false. Understanding is not a
| binary property, despite what e.g. the anti-AI crowd would make
| one believe, and you're no mind reader. I think that's pretty
| agreeable at least.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _In this sense, LLMs don't really change anything. The same
| person operating the tool will continue to be the same person
| in either case._
|
| I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told
| everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's
| isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time
| reaching out to us with questions that have already been
| answered in our KA system. If someone was going to type
| something into an LLM, they could have typed it into a search
| bar. People don't skip the documentation because they can't
| find it; they skip because they don't want to read! They want
| to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!
|
| I was correct. Now we have a costly LLM implementation _and_
| have our time wasted with questions that are already answered.
| stavros wrote:
| You put the LLM in the wrong place. Put it as the first tier
| of email reply, then the people reaching out to you will get
| their LLM reply and not bug you.
| throwmeaway222 wrote:
| Promise of AI: All text will be generated
|
| Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
| kevindamm wrote:
| Will the small web still survive?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| As long as there are dorks obsessed with mini painting,
| trains, odd fish, old knitting patterns, there will be
| communities and blogs for them.
| footy wrote:
| My manager and I had a conversation about this in a recent one
| on one and I realized I may just never read a new author if
| they were published after 2020 again. At least not without a
| very solid recommendation.
|
| I have negative interest in what LLMs write.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| I don't begrudge them their ability to make a living, but it is a
| bit ironic that I can't read an article about reading without a
| subscription or archival service. I get that isn't really the
| point of the article, but I do think that news/magazines
| inability to find a way to successfully move beyond the heavily
| subsidized advertising-supported model (and so the current clunky
| experience in general) cannot help inspire more people to read.
| Not claiming it actively reduces readers as a whole, just that
| it's one less avenue for increasing the desire to do so.
| Animats wrote:
| From the article: _" About midway through my graduate program, I
| had to sit for a general exam--an hours-long cross-examination
| conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading
| list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the
| whole of English literature, from Beowulf to "Beloved," and
| included items like "Joyce, Ulysses," and "Yeats, Poems." I read
| day and night; to persevere without eyestrain, I had to buy a
| special lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand."_
|
| And get off my lawn.
|
| Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet,
| many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now
| they write a few every day.
| pessimizer wrote:
| People are so much more literate than they were even a short
| time ago. Having to type in order to participate on the
| internet and the Harry Potter phenomenon both seriously
| upgraded world literacy in general.
|
| edit:
|
| > [...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun
| "almost every day" fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen
| per cent.
|
| Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on
| the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to
| 100%
| Loughla wrote:
| Are 13 year olds reading on the Internet though? My
| experience working with the youth is that they consume video,
| not written material
| SamBam wrote:
| Evidence?
| coliveira wrote:
| You have no idea what teens are doing, it is mostly video all
| day long.
| tolerance wrote:
| The issue is reading comprehension. Not the mere ability to
| read.
| d0odk wrote:
| The article has several paragraphs addressing these points...
| chairmansteve wrote:
| He almost certainly didn't read it....
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet,
| many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph.
| Now they write a few every day.
|
| I'm not convinced this is providing any value in the way you're
| implying. When people talk about the cognitive benefits of
| writing, what they mean is writing which makes you organize
| your thoughts, and notice when they are messy and disjointed. I
| think a majority of the writing people do online is not of that
| form: instead it takes the form of emotional outbursts which
| essentially go directly from the amygdala to the fingers and
| barely involve the higher brain functions at all, much less
| trigger the kind of introspection and reflection that people
| mean when they say writing is good for you.
|
| In other words, just as not all reading is equally valuable, I
| don't think all writing is either and I think almost all
| Internet writing is of the low-value kind.
| SamBam wrote:
| > Actually, young people are writing more.
|
| Is this a feeling, or something you know from statistics?
|
| Many of the teens I know (I'm a teacher) aren't writing blog
| posts, or even comments on Reddit. They're watching YouTube
| videos and not interacting back with anything more than a
| thumbs up.
|
| Sure, some are writing on anime subreddits or whatever, but I
| don't want to make generalizations for what teens are doing
| across the US or the rest of the Western world without some
| kind of statistics.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| They're writing in iMessage, Instagram, and ChatGPT.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| But not in paragraphs. Their written language in those
| forums is short form sentences that are a mix of emojis and
| almost randomly inserted words that are more akin to
| honorifics sprinkled in to convey tone "no cap" "frfr"
| daedrdev wrote:
| It's hard to find recent data, but the trend has been far
| more books were published in the 2010s than in the decades
| before, by like 10 or 100x. There is an even more enormous
| amount of fan works published. However, data since ChatGPT
| was invented is probably poisoned by people using it to write
| even if I could find it.
| conductr wrote:
| Distribution has opened up, so it's not exactly an apples
| to apples comparison when looking a # of books published
| statistic
|
| I have a friend that published a kids book over the course
| of a weekend, it's for sale on Amazon. It's sold hardly any
| copies but it's been published
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Before the Internet, many people out of school never again
| wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
|
| If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate
| description might be a random sample of phrases that
| spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to
| each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like
| grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.
| prerok wrote:
| Joyce would be proud :P
| azangru wrote:
| Yes; this is what university courses in literature do: they
| force-feed texts to students at a rate that many struggle to
| absorb. Instead of reading selected texts slowly and with
| pleasure, students rush through them with curses. It's been
| bewildering to me, back when I was going through a similar,
| though lighter, ordeal, why this was the case.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| did they really just paywall an article about how nobody reads
| things anymore?
| taco_emoji wrote:
| tldr
| sw030695 wrote:
| "There's something both diffuse and concentrated about reading
| now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen,
| while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the
| like insures that, once we've begun to read, we must continually
| choose not to stop."
|
| Ironically straight after reading this was an inline video
| advertisement, and this page crashes constantly (2.6 GB memory
| usage for an article?)
| ainiriand wrote:
| Kind of off topic but what browser are you using?
| sw030695 wrote:
| Google Chrome, so maybe to be expected, but 2.6GB is a lot
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Remember reading "highlights" and getting scholastic magazines
| where you could choose which books to buy?
|
| Good luck finding that kind of ambient infrastructure for
| pleasure reading today...
| smeej wrote:
| I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new.
|
| I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average
| American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard
| English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me
| now, given that the average adult _has_ completed elementary
| school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.
|
| I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk
| into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a
| book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so
| aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that
| do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with
| anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak
| the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll
| probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's
| putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's
| important for work.
|
| Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person.
| They don't just see written words and know what they say. They
| really have to work to get meaning out of written text.
|
| With the proliferation of other means of taking in information,
| many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play
| and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They
| didn't _want_ to do it before. And now they don 't _need_ to do
| it either.
| hellisothers wrote:
| > Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to
| try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can
| read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection
| they would use to speak the same words
|
| Is this tru'ish? I'm not refuting it I'm just a little shocked
| this might be the situation we're in. I know generally people
| now struggle to consume long form content but it even being
| able to read a story?
| bombcar wrote:
| It's probably true insofar as if random assholes accost me
| and ask to read a page from a book I'm more likely to employ
| old Anglo Saxon than engage with their stupidity.
| watwut wrote:
| A weirdo approaches you with a highly unusual request. You
| suspect the goal is to humiliate you or make you into a dummy
| somehow, which is actually their goal. No thanks.
|
| > I know generally people now struggle to consume long form
| content but it even being able to read a story?
|
| There is reading and then there is reading an unknown text
| out loud in public while being judged. The two are not the
| same thing. I had to read publicly when I was a student years
| ago when smartphones were a new thing. They handed me the
| text with instructions to reread it at least twice ideally
| out loud before performing.
|
| The point is, it is not like 20 years ago a good student
| would be expected to read super fluidly out loud in public
| without at least a little preparation.
| footy wrote:
| I read like 80 books in a slow year but if someone approached
| me at the grocery store and asked me to read even a
| children's book I would refuse. It's not because I can't
| read, it's because when I'm at the grocery store I am kind of
| busy getting my groceries and don't want to engage with a
| stranger who has an odd request.
|
| That stranger might conclude I can't read, when in reality I
| devour books, am the beta reader for my two published-author
| friends, and probably edit the "thoughts on books I've read"
| section of my personal wiki more than any other.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I don't want to correlate the ability to read aloud to a
| stranger about the same as parsing. It's possible to read and
| not parse what you're saying (that's what teleprompters are
| for) and its possible to parse and not speak. Do we have formal
| studies for comprehension?
| rizzom5000 wrote:
| I believe you, and this has been know for decades.
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
|
| The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated
| are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into
| our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I think that you're greatly overstating the point.
|
| > But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a
| page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you.
|
| I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop
| doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.
| photonthug wrote:
| I don't know. Talking with strangers is always kind of
| insane, or at least a pretty illogical leap of faith, because
| there's not much chance that the interaction is interesting
| or amusing. Now a stranger that walks up to me and demands
| some dramatic reading of Paradise Lost, stat? Ok, I'm
| intrigued, hold my beer and buckle up while I let you hear
| about regions of sorrow and darkness visible because the
| produce section has never seen some shit like this
| jraph wrote:
| > walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page
| out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many
| people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of
| the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read
| the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they
| would use to speak the same words
|
| Of course.
|
| I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not
| stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would
| probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of
| reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm
| feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my
| mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in
| a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the
| content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply
| reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading
| and articulating speech.
|
| What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your
| own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at
| least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud,
| you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the
| prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence
| in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.
|
| Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud
| probably takes practice to be smooth.
|
| With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things
| unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't
| draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.
|
| Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write
| well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly
| complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.
|
| We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are
| not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their
| ability to remain focused... in a setting where they possibly
| get interrupted very frequently.
|
| For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed
| hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of
| their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they
| are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually
| interesting to them, and how well the author of the text
| writes.
| kixiQu wrote:
| > With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things
| unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't
| draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.
|
| Even "caught off guard", not "feeling particularly positive",
| and "reading phrasing from someone else", some people have so
| fundamentally mastered reading as a skill that this wouldn't
| be difficult for them even if the challenge were attempted
| _drunk_. The point of the parent comment was, I believe, that
| for such people it may be hard to imagine that others would
| believe "reading a wall of text is indeed hard" because it
| _isn 't_ for them.
| sneak wrote:
| You have spent a lot of time and effort to explain precisely
| how and why you failed to get GP's point, which is completely
| true and valid despite whatever unintentional misdirection
| you have posted in response.
| DrammBA wrote:
| Do schools not ask kids to read out loud in class anymore?
| Any one of my classmates could read a page out loud fluently
| even if you stopped them randomly at the grocery store, and
| most of us are not even 30 yet.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| ... if I was asked by a stranger to read a page of book for
| them out of blue in a store, I'd be staring dumbfounded,
| questioning whether everything's alright with them.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You overlooked one crucial fact.
|
| > I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average
| American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard
| English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to
| me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary
| school, but most people are barely functionally literate at
| all.
|
| They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking
| shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're
| bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe
| your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones
| radar that they'll actually pay attention?
| conductr wrote:
| This. If someone sends me a full page email, I immediately
| skip it. No time for that. They'll follow up more concisely
| when it becomes important. Or if it requires such elaborate
| description, a phone call or meeting would have probably been
| a better channel for this communication. Likewise, anytime I
| start typing an email and it gets lengthy I know I'd be
| better off picking up the phone/scheduling a call.
| joshvm wrote:
| Is it fair to assume that comfort in speaking/oration
| correlates to reading comprehension?
|
| I don't know that what you've described is any different now
| than 20 years ago when I was in high school. People struggled
| to read aloud texts like plays or classic literature. I would
| use that as a bar for complex prose that benefits from good
| narration; often the point was to encounter unfamiliar words or
| meter and to read with the purpose of critical analysis. A
| friend of mine is an author and we did a group reading of a
| play they'd written. Quite hard to do off the bat. Similarly if
| you've ever tried to DM a role-playing game like DnD, where the
| text you read is semi-randomly chosen based on what the
| characters decided to do (also, will you role-play dialog?).
|
| I've worked in academia for 10+ years at this point. You can
| tell almost immediately if a presenter has had practice, knows
| their material or is comfortable speaking in public. Lecturers
| and professors are, unsurprisingly, often very comfortable
| giving presentations and there are people who _live_ for
| conferences and working groups. We 're required to read dense
| material frequently. Understanding of a piece of work, or the
| attention span required to ingest a scientific paper, does not
| necessarily mean you could read it aloud fluently.
| conductr wrote:
| I think one can possess decent reading comprehension skills
| while also be deficient in their reading aloud skill. Beyond
| classroom requirements, reading aloud is not a typical activity
| many people engage in even if reading silently is.
| pfg_ wrote:
| I can read in my head fine. Reading aloud I'm slow and words
| come out stilted. It's a skill that takes practice to be good
| at, and it's rare to need. I don't think that's a useful
| metric.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| While different places define "literate" differently, I've seen
| figures that say 20% of adults in the USA are functionally
| illiterate.
| whycome wrote:
| > These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then
| continue it on the go, via audio narration
|
| Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I'm
| surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there's not a more
| streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio
| version.
| rpdillon wrote:
| This has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times.
|
| https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| Interestingly enough Claude has me reading much more. Especially
| with math books, one of the greatest challenges to self-study can
| be making sure you are in fact getting the concepts correct.
| Without this it's easy to get fairly deep into a book only to
| give up once you realize you haven't quite built the picture in
| your head right. Often you do get it, but it takes multiple re-
| reads/alternate views of the problem.
|
| With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding.
| When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have
| to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify
| formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my
| learning and has me reading much more these days.
|
| Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations,
| especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment
| of a subject.
| interestica wrote:
| I saw an example recently of a sort of "AI Codec" : A person has
| to send a message to a respected figure of authority. They
| organize their thoughts and requests into a clear and concise
| bulleted list with explanations. But, that seemed heavily
| informal and unprofessional. So they used AI to convert the
| bullets to paragraphs and sent it out.
|
| The authority received the large body of text but, due to time
| commitments and attention, they didn't have time to read it all.
| They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.
| shiandow wrote:
| What's happening to reading? Followed by several popups that
| unaccountably take ages to make themselves known and prevent me
| from reading the damn article.
|
| Not the point they wanted to make, but a point nonetheless.
| swayvil wrote:
| Reading is very drug-like. Staring for hours. Focusing your
| attention on this visually-inspired, elongated mental event. It
| alters your consciousness for sure. And we're pushing it on kids.
|
| Some of the most enthusiastic readers I know are also opiate
| addicts.
| xorvoid wrote:
| For many people, _paywalls_ may be bringing the age of
| traditional text to an end.
| Frotag wrote:
| > It's reasonable to argue that some kinds of writing shouldn't,
| or perhaps can't, be summarized. [...] maybe a chatbot could
| explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does--but length
| and difficulty are part of the point of that book
|
| I get that there's an emotional payoff to things like flowery
| prose. It helps put you in the mindset of the author /
| characters, which makes seeing them overcome whatever problems
| all the more satisfying. That's what I expect if I pick up a book
| about say, friends-since-birth being torn apart by war, with one
| entering the military and committing atrocities to reunite them.
|
| On the other hand, if I pick up a book about deciphering alien
| language found on the moon, I'm not reading for the characters.
| I'm reading to see how hypothetical aliens would think. Which in
| practice is often "what would humans be like if we added /
| removed constraint X" (eg perfect empathy or genetic memory). In
| this case, lengthy prose and other character development just
| feel like filler. Like I don't actually care that the character
| became interested in linguistics after growing up on a farm and
| watching animal behavior. Just tell me about the aliens!
| maksimur wrote:
| I wonder if we even need to consume content by _reading_ , as
| opposed to watching or listening, to be neurologically healthy
| and developed, considering it's something we didn't start doing
| until a few thousand years ago. Isn't reading kind of a
| specialization of watching?
| nomadygnt wrote:
| In my mind reading is more similar to thinking than watching. I
| have no basis for this but it just feels more mentally active.
| Of course it could just be my biases but I feel it is much
| easier to passively watch or listen to something rather than to
| read. But also I would say from my own experience writing and
| speaking promote "neurological health" even more so maybe the
| method of consumption is not as important as long as there is
| sufficient synthesis and thought on the other end.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| We don't _need_ to, in the sense that we survived without it.
| However a key difference between reading and passively
| listening or watching is the ability to dynamically vary the
| pace and re-thread ideas together. E.g. to slow down during
| complex parts, e.g. involving lots of pronouns, tenses, or
| familial relations, to move your eyes around on the page, and
| even to pause a moment to quiz and rehearse to ones ' self on
| the material. To even attempt to connect it with existing ideas
| from other sources.
|
| While theoretically possible with non-linear media like videos
| and audio playback, the fluidity of reading is far superior.
| Thus, passive consumption leads to many fragments of ideas
| remaining atomized and not sticking. In contrast, reading
| allows one to efficiently stitch numerous ideas together.
|
| The point of reading is not to become convinced or apprehend a
| single summarizable point. Rather, it is to fill one's memory
| banks with thoughts, experiences and ideas that can be combined
| with other ones and synthesize new information.
|
| Contrast wandering though a botanical garden, reading labels
| and looking at plants on the one hand. On the other hand,
| picture a slow-moving bus that rolls continuously through the
| garden. The bus may pause from time to time, but mostly it
| remains on the path, letting you watch things go by from a
| distance. Both means of travel "get you through" the garden,
| but the self-pacing version allows a personal connection to the
| information.
|
| So it would be convenient for a farmer to have his animals
| illiterate, yet capable of listening passively to commands over
| loudspeakers. And to the farmer, it would be inconvenient for
| these animals to learn to read and explore material on their
| own which would eventually lead them to an awareness that they
| don't want to be fenced in, farmed, and eaten. So you can see
| why some questionable leaders are comfortable with illiteracy
| as a means of control. While others seek to empower humanity
| through encouraging reading.
| thisoneisreal wrote:
| Strongly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" if you're
| interested in exploring this question further. It has a strong
| bias towards reading but does a very thoughtful comparison of
| various media. We don't _need_ to consume content of any form,
| of course.
| orsenthil wrote:
| "maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than
| Hofstadter does--but length and difficulty are part of the point
| of that book"
|
| This the crux of this article which I agree with. Read it.
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