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What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

washingtonpost.com

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Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#71

Post by stephengillie »

kbenson wrote: post #70
AlwaysRock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading. To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/stor…

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

I got in trouble in high school for reading the Dragon Reborn novels during class. Mostly band class.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#72

Post by Latty »

kbenson wrote: post #70
AlwaysRock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading. To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/stor…

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

This has always been the thing for me - I hate reading a novel and not going cover-to-cover. I get so immersed and coming out of it feels like ruining the experience.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#73

Post by daveslash »

This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Many people believe the story to be about censorship, but Bradbury himself (in his later years) publicly claimed it was about peoples' increasingly short attention spans. In Fahrenheit 451, people were afraid of books because the stories, thoughts, and concepts were more than mere sound-bytes and were thus unintelligible to the masses with shortened attention spans.

Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’ .?.?. This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people. ~Bradbury

Source: https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mi...

[Edit] Punctuation & typos.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#74

Post by heyyyouu »

kd5bjo wrote: post #27
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just the articles, ad blockers work, as does reader mode(s). Even AMP would if they offer it, but AMP is an evil hostile takeover attempt from Google. If it's the subscription paywall, just get the subscription. Else, don't read it on a site infringing on copyright - you're not entitled to the content.

How about illegally charging more if you don’t want to consent to their tracking regime?

How is it illegal to charge?

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#75

Post by hodgesrm »

kbenson wrote: post #70
AlwaysRock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading. To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/stor…

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

Binge reading was serious problem with the Stieg Larsson Millenium novels, starting with 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. I didn't sleep much until I finished them.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#76

Post by Greed »

stephengillie wrote: post #71
kbenson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

I got in trouble in high school for reading the Dragon Reborn novels during class. Mostly band class.

Carai an Ellisande! Tai'shar Manetheren! Tai'shar Malkier!

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#77

Post by longerthoughts »

dpark wrote: post #56

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.” Translation: I stopped reading novels and then f…

>The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it.

Can't it be both? If our brains adapt based on the way we consume information, wouldn't it make sense that both abstinence from reading novels and reading through a drastically different medium would potentially degrade performance in reading novels?

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#78

Post by WalterSear »

kbenson wrote: post #70
AlwaysRock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading. To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/stor…

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

Someone should create a book that helps us manage this harmful technology! We should, at least, keep novels out of the reach of children.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#79

Post by gdubs »

After the 2016 election, during which I spent an inordinate time online, constantly searching for some 'new' piece of information like a smoker lighting up a cigarette before the last one had finished burning, I realized that I was having a harder time than usual getting through the books I was reading. The effect was two-fold: not only was I spending more time online, I was fragmenting my attention; when I sat down to read a book, I found my brain was pausing for interruptions. I was training myself to self-interrupt. The book, "The Distracted Mind" goes deep into the science behind this phenomena, and is really worth checking out.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#80

Post by jodrellblank »

bootsz wrote: post #53
Aeolun wrote: post #48

It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of very-short-form content on a daily basis. On HN and elsewhere on the internet you can consume a huge number of distinct ideas in a very short time. This causes me to now be impatient with long-form pieces where I find myself wanting to just "get to the point alre…

"there's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads"

Is there? Or are you just saying that because it's expected and you'd feel embarrassed if you said otherwise?

Humans are pattern matchers, what if we see patterns more easily from many examples, rather than one? What if we extract patterns more easily seeing them from many points of view instead of just one author?

Is a neural network better trained on one high detail photo, or a dataset of many photos?

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