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

131–140 of 351 posts

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

#131

Post by mistermann »

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.

If one is able to be comfortable with the unknown (a state that can't be escaped except through a simulation), checking everything isn't required.

It's like juggling three balls in a way: if you can't do it, it isn't necessary to believe you can. So too with knowledge, except it's like a thousand times as hard.

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

#132

Post by fiforpg »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #48
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…

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…

Not only written text is a faster way to communicate information, it is so because it has much bigger context window:

"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.

"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.

In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.

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

#133

Post by Anthony-G »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #120
Anthony-G wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also a confusing typo in “the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online”. I presume “gauze” was intended be “gaze”.

Why presume that? "Gauze" makes sense.

I read the sentence a couple of times to try to figure out what the phrase “ephemeral gauze” was intended to convey but failed to make sense of it. So, I figured that “gaze” may have been the intended word, i.e., readers pay particular attention to text while they’re in the process of reading it (gaze) but that it’s quickly forgotten when they move on to the next unrelated thing they see on the Internet (ephemerality).

I’m only familiar with gauze in the context of first-aid kits and other medical usage so I’d appreciate hearing your interpretation of “ephemeral gauze”.

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

#134

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

Every time I read about the next generation not being able to read, I recall all the boomers falling for penis enlargement pill scams again and again. Exactly the people who complain about standard tests being too easy nowadays are the people who panic at the sight of a self-checkout.

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

#135

Post by iandanforth »

This is a frustratingly bad article.

The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable, and not the content.

This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books. It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet.

The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed.

Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed out how long form content trains concentration, short and long term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.

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

#136

Post by exceptione »

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…

    The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it?
Simple but effective solution:

1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.

2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.

3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.

Or democracy will perish eventually.

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

#137

Post by randysalami »

oidar wrote: post #106
Sam6late wrote: post #70

My 2 cents: 1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level re…

>I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments. What happened to the tal…

The middle class is being liquidated

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

#138

Post by FredPret »

cess11 wrote: post #104
Nevermark wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Power, like money, is mainly inherited.

This sounds more like a slogan, a belief, than a fact.

It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]

Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]

We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.

This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.

What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.

[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...

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

#139

Post by edflsafoiewq »

Anthony-G wrote: post #133
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why presume that? "Gauze" makes sense.

I read the sentence a couple of times to try to figure out what the phrase “ephemeral gauze” was intended to convey but failed to make sense of it. So, I figured that “gaze” may have been the intended word, i.e., readers pay particular attention to text while they’re in the process of reading it (gaze) but that it’s quickly forgotten when they move on to the next unrelated thing they see on the Internet (ephemerality…

As opposed to the solid materiality of books, the "material" of the internet is an "ephemeral gauze", a thin and shifting fabric (a mesh, literally a web) on which it would be impossible to apply ink, to hold rigid, etc.

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

#140

Post by tempodox »

> Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism.

Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.

Post reply on HN