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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

#121

Post by benreesman »

We really fucked up when we didn’t regulate smart phones like weapons grade uranium.

It’s so fucking toxic. And I’m well aware there are gems in the museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers of gift shop TikTok shit (and it’s plausible that YouTube will be Alphabet’s undoing because YouTube is great for education and a well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a dockyard crane).

Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low capital gains are rape) can’t cope: it’s no longer just implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis, society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a successful match “churn”, and just every godawful thing.

The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for the “best version of the argument”.

Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form in charge of anything worth a billion dollars.

There are gems, it’s not all garbage, but if every smartphone on the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis.

And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP astrology says things are.

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

#122

Post by high_na_euv »

n4r9 wrote: post #90
high_na_euv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sometimes I like to watch how someone does something cuz you can see interesting things

E.g watching developer write software can show you things about OS usage, IDE usage, automation and other tricks and habbits

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

#123

Post by internet_points »

bayindirh wrote: post #105
aquariusDue wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I'm excited about the new batch of PineNote devices, e-readers running Linux with a custom GNOME theme and a passive stylus. And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper. Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be a good enough compromise.

I exclusively use fountain pens and higher quality wirebound notebooks and notepads. I number the notebook, and write the start date at first page. Then I number the pages as I go, and date every page. When the notebook finishes, I remove the binding, scan it at 600DPI, store it as a PDF. I'll be training a local Tesseract installation with my hand writing one day, but I'm not there. However, these notebooks saved th…

[flagged]

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

#124

Post by mistermann »

mandmandam wrote: post #77
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two things going on here: - things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job" - people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News ho…

> things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable "Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here. Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value. FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc. Did they ever speak o…

> How much?

Such an important (and often unpopular) followup question.

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

#125

Post by seabass-labrax »

tgv wrote: post #46
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…

> ...secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago.

On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation, because more than just the test has changed since that time. For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are the present-day students being taught to a test from four decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would need to control for in order to accurately compare performance over time. Although there are certainly people who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance. What do people need to know now, and what books should be read by students in order to learn it?

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

#126

Post by MichaelZuo »

bostonwalker wrote: post #96

Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here. Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of ent…

Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?

I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.

Let alone the median general public.

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

#127

Post by mistermann »

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…

> Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read.

I think you may be on to something, but I would also add that maybe you should consider whether prior to the age of 13 may also be a viable range. I think 13 to it depends is when the problem (roughly, the mind/ego "coming into its own", or something like that) manifests.

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

#128

Post by seabass-labrax »

mandmandam wrote: post #77
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two things going on here: - things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job" - people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News ho…

> things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable "Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here. Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value. FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc. Did they ever speak o…

I think the reason why the FT, among others, don't spend much space on human rights issues is because they are inherently transactional publications in nature. You have to pay to subscribe, and those who do expect something in return - I suspect that this is usually a sense of being 'in the know' on business matters. Obviously knowledge of Jill Stein's manifesto is not going to make its readers any money in the foreseeable future.

I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe. Compare this to the tabloids, which don't charge for online access and make money by peddling particular business or political interests - mostly shady business, I think most would agree. I'd therefore trust FT on the facts, albeit probably not for wide coverage.

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