It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

Oh well we had a good run of 5000 years! See you on the next planet.

Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.

But books also have drawbacks:

1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.

2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.

3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.

There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.

If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.

In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.

Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.

And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'

What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'

So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.

I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.

Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.

Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.

> good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read

Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.

Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp

I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.

which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.

> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.