It's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.
It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
241–250 of 349 posts
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#242> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Rus…
Yeah, this is definitely a massive slight. If it was any other book I'd buy it, but when you read terms like "horrorshow," or "platty", or "droogs" in the first few paragraphs it's not hard to see why one would look up words.
Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?
There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving such a conclusion.
Something like "parallel construction" for law enforcement.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I love learning, but I hate reading. Correction: you love the feeling of consuming information, not learning.
Imagine gatekeeping learning . I suppose the blind are incapable of it, then? Or is taking in information via the fingers somehow more valid than via the ears?
You're extremely limited in the type of learning you can do if you choose not to read. It sounds harsh but the poster is making a salient point. Quality matters and following "I love science" on facebook is not substitute for a proper education (or good book for that matter).
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#244We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…
Can you recommend me a book to read?
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love learning, but I hate reading. Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else. In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.
>Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else. You're not actually learning anything then. Memorizing trivia, sure. But not actually learning.
With me (I have ADHD), I would never be able to listen to an audiobook alone, I would zone out and day dream one paragraph in. But If I'm playing a game on my phone, I can listen and pay attention for hours.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#246We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…
I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.
Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.
And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.
How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#247Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form…
> he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). [emphasis added]
She and her, the author is a woman.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#248> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Rus…
Yeah, this is definitely a massive slight. If it was any other book I'd buy it, but when you read terms like "horrorshow," or "platty", or "droogs" in the first few paragraphs it's not hard to see why one would look up words. Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english? There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving…
> Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?
Presumably the confused student who sought out a translation.
Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
#249This "age of reading" is clickbait.