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In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

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Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#21

Post by exe34 »

mandmandam wrote: post #12
bux93 wrote: post #4

It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.

> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them: * Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. * Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. * Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy…

profit. they have the best information money can buy and they use it to make profit.

Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#22

Post by retskrad »

Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#23

Post by cess11 »

hayleyest wrote: post #3

The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.

It's for people that read books and have done so for a long time. That's all it takes to appreciate it, you really don't need to be a scholar.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#24

Post by kusokurae »

Veen wrote: post #8
hayleyest wrote: post #3

The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.

Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.

[dead]

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#25

Post by clarionbell »

retskrad wrote: post #22

Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of f…

The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#26

Post by mathgeek »

hayleyest wrote: post #3

The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.

I can’t help but imagine some of the folks this message is referring to as “needing to read more” seeing this and dismissing it as using language of “the elites”. There’s a certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#27

Post by red_trumpet »

Funny typo in the subtitle.

> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"

The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#28

Post by kusokurae »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #16
hunglee2 wrote: post #10

That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok

I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment. Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people. I've come to believe that an important part o…

Disagree about the age threshold on epistemology. Being introduced to Hume in my teenage years is what got me to repeatedly revisit and reconsider old ideas, and look for new ones in much the way you describe. Human mental life & development isn't so simple as arbitrary age boundaries and specific, fixed learning environments.

Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points, benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem.

This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon, and see that as something that sets you free and puts the onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight into flimsy pseudo-certainty.

It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing books like that, they were accused by more conservative contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it as something to celebrate and explore.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#29

Post by n4r9 »

clarionbell wrote: post #25
retskrad wrote: post #22

Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of f…

The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.

Yeah. I struggle to understand how podcasts and youtube are an efficient learning resource. They are slow, unstructured, and unsearchable. Whilst some software can ameliorate some of these (e.g. playback speed control), there's no analogue to the process of "can skip this paragraph, can skip this paragraph, let's search back for the definition of this term, let's cross-reference this term with this other text, let's see how many pages are left in this chapter...".

I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#30

Post by ryandv »

hayleyest wrote: post #3

The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.

I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language. Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a higher standard in a piece about literature and written media and books.

Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.

Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.

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