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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

#331

Post by southernplaces7 »

llm_trw wrote: post #288
akkartik wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had to look closely as well to figure out what this was saying. The core reasoning seems to be this one sentence: "Printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of the algorithm since tinkering with code can’t delete their contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive." But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can read offline to keep someone over the network from…

If only there was a place starting with p and ending with "irate bay" where you could get forever copies of books.

Piratebay has always been a poor source for most books. Another site that gets much less attention than zlibrary is as far as I'm concerned an incredible source of books. libgen.

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

#332

Post by wholinator2 »

asdff wrote: post #194
wholinator2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, as long as we continue the requirement that all information conveyed to the public must be done in a way that is maximally profitable to the producer. As long as information must be profitable, it will inevitably cease to be information and turn into entertainment soon enough. When was the last time you saw a TV Station that wasn't majority ads?

At the same time its not like the harder information isn’t available. One can find factual news and pieces of information. This is what the policy wonks who craft policy that the pr wonks spin into soundbites have to be able to find and read to understand the world after all. Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News isn’t to be informed for most people. It is for entertainment like any other fodder con…

I will say though we shouldn't underestimate habitual inertia in all things. My dad will probably watch Cable news till he dies. There's arguably far more interesting and entertaining things on the internet, that i have showed him to access and explore on his laptop, that he uses frequently. But his main source of news appears to be Cable still, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna change.

Then there was the great culling of newspapers and magazines. It was probably the last thing longer than a paragraph that my dad actually read consistently. They mostly went online, stopped being delivered and he was forced off of the reading experience. Sure, you can seek things like that out but it was serendipitous, they got less funding, raises prices, fox continued to foxify, i don't know that he's really read anything since! I, myself, am trying with some difficulty to begin reading more. I need the concentration back

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

#333

Post by mandmandam »

llm_trw wrote: post #330
mandmandam wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else. Financial news from a specific and narrow viewpoint . There are others. This is the third time I've said it now. It would be nice to know where the confusion is coming from. Is it simply that many people can't imagine any alternate view of finance news, other than that sold by FT?

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

I'll try one more time - just for you llm.

What if, back in the slavery days, a newspaper reported solely from the perspective of slaveholders, never slaves. They only printed 'facts' - how much a slave could be expected to depreciate by age, which regions produced the hardest working slaves, etc.

Would this be a 'reliable' paper? Would it just be 'financial news'? Would it simply be a 'premier capitalist publication publishing facts capitalists find useful'? Well, yes, in a way.

And that's exactly what financial newspapers back then did. They traded in dry, money making facts - in support of a deeply exploitative and unsustainable system. Always from one particular perspective - the slaveholder's; that of the ownership class.

'Reliable' isn't a word I would have chosen to describe them.

In more modern times, FT takes huge ad money from fossil fuel companies, cheer-leads the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, has never met a neoliberal/neocon since that they didn't love; and takes the view of the 0.1% 99.9% of the time. Almost completely heedless of the permanent damage that is being done to all life on Earth as a result, except as a side note in an article about how apocalypse might affect your portfolio.

Will any of this sink in? Can you change your mind, or at least the subject? Let's see.

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

#334

Post by esafak »

rixed wrote: post #320
esafak wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ottoman sultans saw those wars and banned the press. The missed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and eventually disappeared.

They were also a bit far from the Americas, which might have contributed to the economic boom of Europe more than the faster spreading of new ideas via books, no?

I'm not talking about wealth per se, but industrialization. Without it, they failed to develop adequate military technology, transportation infrastructure, and agricultural efficiency to free up labor for industrial work. They also lacked coal reserves, and oil was not be a factor until too late in the game.

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

#335

Post by cess11 »

Nevermark wrote: post #329
cess11 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel put him aside before the IPO, which was before Ebay bought them. There's been a lot of reporting about how SpaceX is keeping Musk's influence at a minimum. If you go looking you'll also find video from interviews with Musk in that role where he isn't talking from a script and comes across as a clueless high schooler. Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?

> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills? I don’t like one-sided trolls who are insecure that some other people are exceptional? Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have? — More productively: I don’t have an axe to grind either way, other than giving credit where it is due, and vice versa. My original comment reflected both. He has done some truly incredible work. He earned his…

Do I come across as insecure?

What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?

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

#336

Post by cess11 »

FredPret wrote: post #318
cess11 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apartheid was a crime. SA occupying and running mining operations in other countries was criminal. Profiting from it means you're accumulating criminal wealth. Mistaking first-mover advantage and access to extreme amounts of funding for "kick ass" is quite weird. No, that's not a characteristic of fascism. He's impressed by and promotes nazis, maintains his wealth through corporativism, and so on. No, it's that he ma…

Just going to drill into a couple of aspects of your rant. First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his suppo…

Fascism is a phase under capitalism where ideology breaks down and the people in power are split between going into hiding and panicked power grabs through any means available. Typically it involves ultra-nationalists taking formal political power and increasing the capitalist totalitarian impulse.

The state is much, much more "all-embracing" today than what Mussolini could ever have imagined, and has been for a long time, decades.

Musk wants a more total influence on the world, he doesn't want anyone to be able to say something negative about him, for example. He wants to eradicate large swathes of people, explicitly by making it impossible to talk about them and in practice it will likely boil down to the destruction of their bodies once that fails.

You're obviously sympathetic to this neo-fascist movement. Let's hope you'll manage to leave, because by now it looks like the resistance to it has to get violent.

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

#337

Post by casey2 »

bayindirh wrote: post #88
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 podca…

How come the only person who can ever seem to find conclusive research of this is Haidt? He really must head and shoulders above the lazy people in this field.

The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done

Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?

From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.

[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/m...

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

#338

Post by bayindirh »

casey2 wrote: post #337
bayindirh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 podca…

How come the only person who can ever seem to find conclusive research of this is Haidt? He really must head and shoulders above the lazy people in this field. The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding cou…

Sorry, I'll be using my lazy card here and give a concise answer, which you can extrapolate to find the answers to all of your questions.

PISA is a standardized test conducted by OECD for International Student Assessment. It's homepage is located at [0], alongside with datasets for all previous tests, and plethora of material.

So, you can download the data, look at the questions in any language you prefer, do your own analysis.

I'll just reiterate that, my personal experience mirrors the article. Extreme reliance of smart devices and technologies like conversational LLMs reduce the cognitive ability and deep thinking capacity tremendously. Children and people become interfaces to these devices they use. They just delegate all their thinking to these devices and live a much hollower life.

[0]: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/pisa.html

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

#339

Post by FredPret »

cess11 wrote: post #336
FredPret wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just going to drill into a couple of aspects of your rant. First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his suppo…

Fascism is a phase under capitalism where ideology breaks down and the people in power are split between going into hiding and panicked power grabs through any means available. Typically it involves ultra-nationalists taking formal political power and increasing the capitalist totalitarian impulse. The state is much, much more "all-embracing" today than what Mussolini could ever have imagined, and has been for a long…

[flagged]

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

#340

Post by Nevermark »

cess11 wrote: post #335
Nevermark wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills? I don’t like one-sided trolls who are insecure that some other people are exceptional? Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have? — More productively: I don’t have an axe to grind either way, other than giving credit where it is due, and vice versa. My original comment reflected both. He has done some truly incredible work. He earned his…

Do I come across as insecure? What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?

> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?

I responded to your pointless, inaccurate and rude conjecture with an equally pointless, rude, and what I assumed was an equally inaccurate conjecture to suggest that perhaps we keep our conversation substantive.

If the sense in that still isn’t clear, you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.

> What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?

I don’t know how “success” could be any more evident.

But if you believe you see shortcuts that were taken, then perhaps take your insight and do something comparable? Good luck!

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