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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

#161

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

Both composing text and reading map closely to thinking.

The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).

For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.

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

#163

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

blackoil wrote: post #151

IIRC one of the common factor with genius/prodigies of yesteryears is they all worked 1:1 or in a small group with some reasonably talented teachers. Unfortunately that is not scalable for mass, so may be custom designed Device + LLM may work better than giving up digital.

Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in a class full of kids much smarter than me.

As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).

Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often.

The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.

I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.

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

#164

Post by vacuity »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #40
blackoil wrote: post #9

I agree with two major issues raised here. Importance of reading long form content and harms of environment full of distractions. Saying that solution is not turning back and giving up on digital. It would be same as giving up on printing to embrace a teacher focused learning.

Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with: "Use decent software. And make copies." And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?

I think the author would say that certain forms of content, like blogs, can be useful. I don't think they're completely eschewing digital reading, but instead pushing for far more print reading than is common now. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

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

#165

Post by le-mark »

nataliste wrote: post #95

Cronus eats his children. In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum , "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does. Similarly, Plato m…

Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has always been so, or worse.

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

#166

Post by vacuity »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #71

“when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?

> Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?

At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when the conventionally powerful people own the content producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not simple at all, who to listen to.

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

#167

Post by rixed »

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

But can pupils from 30 or 40 years ago pass today's exams?

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

#168

Post by vacuity »

lazystar wrote: post #107

this type of situation is not unique in human history - it happens after the invention of any device that disseminates information on a mass scale. for example, see the printing press: > The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (rev…

I think the Internet medium is sufficiently different from past advancements that such analogies don't work. It's not necessarily that the Internet brings fundamentally different capabilities, perhaps we can reason about how its new scale makes some capabilities emerge as others, but it's the same outcome either way.

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

#169

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

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…

There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.

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

#170

Post by vacuity »

iandanforth wrote: post #135

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 phy…

Perhaps the author doesn't make the case well, but the implication is that reading print primes the mind in a way that presents better emotional and intellectual consumption of the content.
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