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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

#41

Post by ethernot »

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…

I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes.

When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.

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

#42

Post by Nevermark »

cess11 wrote: post #20
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.

You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on? I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly info…

"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context.

Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.

On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.

I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.

They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.

I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.

People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.

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

#43

Post by m-i-l »

A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and physical destruction.

Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?

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

#44

Post by gonzo41 »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #31
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…

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved? Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that require…

Remember when films used to be a tight 90 minutes of snappy editing. Now everything is getting close to 3 hours, it's not because the stories are better or more complex it's people not being ruthless in their editing.

I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing words.

Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to focus their effort.

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

#45

Post by nverno »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
nverno wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh" But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.

But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.

I mean, it's both right? It's easier to work on fixing policy if you're not a drug addict reading poisoned info.

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

#46

Post by tgv »

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…

> Times have changed.

Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.

> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].

Proof needed. You can't just say that.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.

The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.

And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.

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

#47

Post by JumpCrisscross »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #39

What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow readers.

> Only selected few buy books, because it costs money

I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)

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

#48

Post by short_sells_poo »

n4r9 wrote: post #29
clarionbell wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of everything having to be a video. I can read much-much faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow. So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10 minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to smash that bell because it helps me so much"...

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

#49

Post by porridgeraisin »

yawpitch wrote: post #2

The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.

I disabled brave shields for a moment and wow. Especially the youtube-like iframe that slid in from the right. Crazy.

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

#50

Post by gitanovic »

gonzo41 wrote: post #44
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved? Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that require…

Remember when films used to be a tight 90 minutes of snappy editing. Now everything is getting close to 3 hours, it's not because the stories are better or more complex it's people not being ruthless in their editing. I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog…

That is very true, although I also have the opposite example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one for calculus) were so dense with information that I could not make head and tails

I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible

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