Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 351 posts

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

#81

Post by llm_trw »

pjc50 wrote: post #37
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

The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.

>You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.

I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with the corpus of works.

In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the next 6 months.

Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to all the journals legally unlike the average person.

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

#82

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

falcor84 wrote: post #68
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.

I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows you to context switch to a million different things, and even an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work. There…

That's true too. Both costs matter.

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

#83

Post by Jedd »

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…

> Students who use ChatGPT ... to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated ...

Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your observations of your younger relatives?

Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years spent mastering' with LLMs.

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

#84

Post by llm_trw »

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.

The irony is that even the ads on the site are so terrible they take a good 30 seconds to fully load.

When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like it did with an adblocker on, but eventually: https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm

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

#85

Post by youoy »

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…

Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more efficient to build a high level map of the subject using podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and the end result is the same.

Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.

Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...

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

#86

Post by mandmandam »

exe34 wrote: post #21
mandmandam wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> a perfect motive

It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant:

> Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.

- Alanis Obomsawin

This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years.

Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.

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

#87

Post by zusammen »

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.

The point these focus-deprived children could accurately make is that our adult world is also about reward hacking and bullshit metrics. I’m old but I will tell you that everything I dislike that I see in the young is society’s fault. We did a truly terrible job of giving them a world in which to become better, rather than worse, people.

In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.

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

#88

Post by bayindirh »

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…

Disclosure: I worked on developing smartboard technology for students in my country.

Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...

On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?

There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.

I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.

From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.

We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.

If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.

The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.

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

#89

Post by llamaimperative »

xorcist wrote: post #65
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.

From my experience it is obviously the latter. Reading well, on paper or on screen, really requires you to put your complete attention to it. Audio (podcasts) and video (youtube) have the advantage of not requiring your complete attention. Everything else follows from that. Of course it can fit some people better. Just not where it matters.

There’s no such thing as multitasking. It is a literal illusion and is one big reason why people who can’t sit down and actually read a book (or lie down with eyes closed and LISTEN to a podcast/lecture) produce for themselves the illusion of understanding.

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

#90

Post by n4r9 »

high_na_euv wrote: post #80
n4r9 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The good thing about videos is that you can literally see somebody doing something from end tonend Not just the critical part described in an article

Surely an article can cover a process end-to-end, just as a video can focus on only a critical part. Do you mean that the medium of video encourages the author to be more thorough?
Post reply on HN