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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#171

Post by beloch »

nemomarx wrote: post #168
beloch wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong. I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading. Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're…

Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?

Click-bait. I'm not immune. I see something tantalizing and then I have to know. I've been burned by Hacker News more than once.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#172

Post by homarp »

nemomarx wrote: post #168
beloch wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong. I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading. Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're…

Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?

https://longreads.com/ maybe

Re: What's happening to reading?

#173

Post by mkehrt »

jcranmer wrote: post #42
datadrivenangel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?

I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.

I'm pretty sure "Michaelmas term" is just a Britishism sill in use today.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#174

Post by Zedseayou »

allturtles wrote: post #82
zapw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand the passage and what follows, it is actually important to know what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is. And to be clear, it's not an "inn" in the standard modern usage of the term, but rather a rather a professional association for lawyers.

You can figure out from later context that it's some kind of legal institution with an associated court. The students were also allowed to look things up: "Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource" [0] [0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346

Unfortunately, from the study, most of the subjects had no idea there was anything to do with a court or lawyers by the end of the passages at all.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#175

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Animats wrote: post #113

From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain,…

> Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.

If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate description might be a random sample of phrases that spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#176

Post by layer8 »

jcranmer wrote: post #42
datadrivenangel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?

I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.

The explanation is nowadays just a tap-and-hold away, however, on a mobile device.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#177

Post by asimpletune »

compacct27 wrote: post #123
asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome. Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figure…

I mean, the insurmountable problem is - and will always be - that true knowledge lies beyond words. You can communicate and articulate and pontificate and these are all good things, but even at their best efforts they will never be more than a mechanical process that will never quite get you there. In other words, there will never be the right words to “get it” because what there is to get is fundamentally unexplainable.

It’s like trying to explain what one may see hear or feel when their on vacation at an exotic new location by talking about the train tracks that brought you there.

So when you’re reading you’re not downloading packets that add up to some kind of point. Instead, in the absolute best case scenario, you’re simulating the experience, according to the author’s recommended doses, of someone else “acquiring” knowledge. This “someone else” is the nameless reader the book was written for but they are not you.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#178

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Tronno wrote: post #150
libraryatnight wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you are…

Not everyone "misses" the point. People can take what they want and choose to discard the rest. Consider, for example, watching beach volleyball not for the thrill of the sport but to ogle the players. That they're also engaged in serious competition is not lost on anyone - the audience just doesn't care. Some authoritarians also like vigilante violence and find it in The Punisher. Some racists also like futuristic f…

>Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.

I can enjoy fiction that doesn't match my worldview... and it doesn't change my worldview. I am immune to propaganda without the inability to appreciate it, or temporarily be entertained by it. And it has fascinated me my entire life that others must be molded into something new from fiction, or run screaming from it with their ears plugged up with nothing in between.

Perhaps the rest of you can do this too, and you're merely being ungenerous in your assumption that those whose politics you disagree with have so little psychological fortitude that they're incapable of the same. Or maybe you can't, and it scares you that they can.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#179

Post by Spivak »

easterncalculus wrote: post #87
Spivak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is, students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English that they don't read, write, or speak; that makes reference and uses turns of phrase that would be well-understood by readers at the time but are archaic to a modern reader. If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the…

This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characte…

Right but we're mixing things

* Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning?

* Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures?

* Does the reader know a bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?

To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second. It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate.

An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#180

Post by staunton »

asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Objections:

- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.

- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.

- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.

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