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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

#101

Post by jodrellblank »

jodrellblank wrote: post #80
bootsz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Someone's got to have a better comeback than a downvote. You know where there's "obviously immense value"? Oil fields. People literally kill to control them.

Nobody kills to take control of a library.

At best you could say people get into massive debt for education. But at the same time, education is clamouring for online courses, videos, conferencing, teachers, interaction, and textbooks are widely considered a problem - low priority, low quality, a racket, going back years since Richard Feynman's famous story about reviewing them at least.

Books, especially academic books, are increasingly given away for free online - when people will pay for entertainment.

How many people learn from a teacher, a course, or learn by doing, vs how many actually learn from books?

People don't treat books the way they treat things they value. There may be immense value in books, it's not "obvious".

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

#102

Post by kbenson »

starshadowx2 wrote: post #96
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.

You may find webserials interesting. They're novels (generally multiple novels in length) published a couple/few chapters a week. You may get into the binge mood if you're reading one already completed or catching up with one currently publishing but once you're at the point waiting it's really nice to be forced to stop and wait.

I actually deleted my second paragraph before posting, which was about how recently a couple webserials have made this even worse. According to their estimated page counts, I've read something like 10,000 pages in less than 3 months.

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

#103

Post by umeshunni »

jasode wrote: post #23

First off, I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research on "deep reading" and its claimed benefits. But, as a person who has read most of the major thick books like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Middlemarch, Proust, and reading cover-to-cover the old computer books like the 3-ring binders of C Language[1], my lifetime reading experience could offer counterpoint to why "deep reading" seems to b…

> I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research

I thought I'd call out that the author is not a scientist and that her "neuroscience" is a soft science like political science or social science. The author has a degree in Literature and not in Psychology or any biological sciences.

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

#106

Post by hudibras »

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…

There's something ironic here about how you felt the need to do a "translation" of two perfectly intelligible English sentences...

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

#107

Post by hudibras »

dpark wrote: post #82
dieterrams wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing about browsing online that intri…

> Second, you're completely wrong that the media formats we consume don't affect the other media formats we consume. Provide some evidence for this claim. People have been decrying the short attention span that “new media” creates for as long as there has been anything that could be described as “new media”.

>Provide some evidence for this claim.

This is exactly what Reader, Come Home, by Maryanne Wolf (i.e., the book being reviewed here) does.

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

#108

Post by bootsz »

jodrellblank wrote: post #80
bootsz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is there?

In my experience, yes. Some of the best & most memorable stuff I've read were in books both novels and non-fiction.

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

#109

Post by gowld »

dpark wrote: post #83
longerthoughts wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Maybe, but many people read tweets and novels, just as many people watch short clips on YouTube but also watch 3-hour films and binge watch entire drama series on Netflix. I don’t see much evidence that consuming fluff significantly impacts our ability to consume material with depth. With the exception that they are competing for time.

You didn't provide any evidence for your claim either: "The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. "

Also, even if correct, you didn't address the risk factors involved that may cause "go long periods without reading novels".

It's intuitively attractive (but I'm not going to research the research right now) to presume that "junk" content -- stuff that provides immediate stimulatio (be they pictures, sounds, foods, or text) that are highly stimulating in a small package have a tendency to crowd out slower-stimulating content.

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

#110

Post by dpark »

hudibras wrote: post #107
dpark wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, you're completely wrong that the media formats we consume don't affect the other media formats we consume. Provide some evidence for this claim. People have been decrying the short attention span that “new media” creates for as long as there has been anything that could be described as “new media”.

>Provide some evidence for this claim. This is exactly what Reader, Come Home , by Maryanne Wolf (i.e., the book being reviewed here) does.

Does it? I don’t have the book, but it sounds from the review that this is a pet theory with no scientific backing.
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