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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

#211

Post by MarcScott »

SoftTalker wrote: post #154
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…

The COVID school closures and remote learning years will prove to be the biggest negative educational/developmental impact on a generation that we've seen in a long time.

And it disproportionately hit the poorest in society the most. My kid had his own room to work in, his own computer to work on, and WFH parents to help him out. He was not, massively, negatively impacted.

In my work, I was in touch with families with multiple children at home, no computers, maybe one or two phones, and no broadband connection. The kids, for all intents and purposes, just lost two years of education.

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

#212

Post by swatcoder »

mlsu wrote: post #195

The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration. When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiologi…

> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.

I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.

Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.

Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.

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

#213

Post by tgv »

rixed wrote: post #167
tgv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I actually did a few math exams recently (I was helping someone study for them), and they were really too easy. I had a hard time catching up with uni maths after breezing through secondary school, but if they nowadays enter with that level, it must be a nightmare.

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

#214

Post by stouset »

mlsu wrote: post #200
paulyy_y wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm interested in what people think about this. Maybe offer some constructive criticism instead of restating what I said and adding lol at the end?

I think it’s pretty clear the GP (and others) believe this is pseudopsychology bunk supported by neither any available evidence nor by professionals in the field.

It takes 1,000x less time and energy to come up with a pet theory de novo and sans any evidence than it takes to debunk. Without backing evidence provided for an idea, it should be as easy to dismiss out of hand as it was to create it in the first place.

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

#215

Post by potsandpans »

perihelions wrote: post #204
paulyy_y wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's (quite ironically!) an artifact of the social media culture itself: the shift towards increasingly unmoored, extreme language, disproportionate to whatever thing it's in response to. The effect of echo chambers both winding people up in agitation spirals, while tuning out influences that'd tend to tamp down the intensity . "I wasted a few hours watching stupid videos and feel regretful about that" != "YouTube ob…

Mm yes. Quite ironic. Yes. Italics. !=, programming.

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

#216

Post by spudlyo »

Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913 dictionary. Best of all, I can prop up my tablet on the elliptical trainer and read for an hour while my heart rate moves through the first four zones as increasing amounts of oxygenated blood rush through my brain causing the words to burn like fire in my mind.

Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper.

[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch

[1]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/middlemarch.png

[2]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin.jpg

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

#217

Post by tayo42 »

oytis wrote: post #63
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.

I also see that in real world too. Too many times I wished a book existed to learn this or that and got an answer that you really need to hang out in multiple Discord groups to stay up-to-date. Newer generation apparently has less difficulty with that. Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that…

Maybe they just think they do because they don't know any better?

Or constant stream of information gives them the illusion of staying informed

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

#218

Post by bostonwalker »

asdff wrote: post #191
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…

I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believ…

Naively, I would think the same. But in the first part of AOTD, Neil Postman argues pretty convincingly that America in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most literate, bookish society on Earth and in the later parts of the book that that heritage was lost with the invention of the telegraph, radio, and later TV.

In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made us dumber in a real sense.

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

#219

Post by kleinsch »

mlsu wrote: post #195

The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration. When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiologi…

You’re commenting on an article about reading, which is also a solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you’re not trying to make the point that reading books destroys relationships and self construction, so this seems like a roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption activity is better than what other people choose.

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

#220

Post by absoluteunit1 »

spudlyo wrote: post #216

Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913…

This. I couldn’t agree more. The text is searchable, indexable, word definitions can be searched right within the text, highlights are saved and indexable, etc.

Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.

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