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

theatlantic.com

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

#261

Post by phil21 »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #14
TrackerFF wrote: post #3

I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person. Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a l…

I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all. I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading. In my ca…

Yeah, reading for me is hot and cold streaks. I’ll read for 3-9mo straight, then go about the same not reading at all. Tends to coincide with life stress and work schedule for the most part, but also just picking up other interests that soak up time!

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

#262

Post by dag100 »

shimman wrote: post #242
bkandel wrote: post #174

> 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…

Could the student really not infer the meanings of those words from context? I don't think Burgess expected his readers to have a working knowledge of Russian.

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

#263

Post by vincent-manis »

bkandel wrote: post #174

> 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…

Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you gradually start making sense of it. The glossary is useful in demonstrating how brilliantly constructed the Nadsat language is, especially the words derived from Russian: horrorshow from khorosho, good; lewdies from lyudi, people; and starry from starei, old.

I disagree with much of Burgess's politics,but his use of language was masterful.

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

#264

Post by chowells »

eudamoniac wrote: post #236
taeric wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, it isn't "doing it bad" if you aren't out there reading deep texts. Just as it isn't "doing it badly" if you can't run a 4 minute mile. As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.

But it's also important to realize that it is "doing it bad" if you are hoping to run a 4 minute mile but your only training is slowly walking around the block forever. At some point you have to seek out more substantial books. You can't just continually read pulp fiction and think you're going to improve at anything; you have to progress.

Improve at what? Pretentiousness?

Book people really hate to hear it, but literary fiction follows Sturgeon's law just as much as Sturgeon's own genre. 90% of it isn't worth reading, and that includes 90% of what's fashionable at any given time. You're better off reading books you enjoy than suffering through garbage that you're told you're a bad person if you don't read.

(Literary fiction isn't bad. But for the love of reading, skip anything new and fashionable until enough decades go by for the influnce of fashion to fade. And skip things that aren't enjoyable to actually read.)

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

#265

Post by unknownfuture »

_doctor_love wrote: post #21

We 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…

> 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.

The rise of vibecoding and the disdain many in the industry hold for the skill of software development should fully disabuse you of any vestiges of this notion...

Every single day, here, on "Hacker" news I see folks describe coding as just a means to an end, and that things like code quality, architecture, etc, don't matter.

Welcome to late stage capitalism, where if you can't immediately monetize it its not worth doing (consider how this might explain the rise of gambling as recreation).

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

#266

Post by babelfish »

trashb wrote: post #213

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. This sentence undermines the whole article. People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading". The shape of reading…

> Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online

Agree that we should work on reducing the stigma around reading (which, incidentally, feels ridiculous to type); but very clearly one of these exercises your mind and one doesn't. People should want to learn things!

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

#267

Post by eudamoniac »

chowells wrote: post #264
eudamoniac wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's also important to realize that it is "doing it bad" if you are hoping to run a 4 minute mile but your only training is slowly walking around the block forever. At some point you have to seek out more substantial books. You can't just continually read pulp fiction and think you're going to improve at anything; you have to progress.

Improve at what? Pretentiousness? Book people really hate to hear it, but literary fiction follows Sturgeon's law just as much as Sturgeon's own genre. 90% of it isn't worth reading, and that includes 90% of what's fashionable at any given time. You're better off reading books you enjoy than suffering through garbage that you're told you're a bad person if you don't read. (Literary fiction isn't bad. But for the love…

Improve at the ability to read, understand, and digest higher literature.

I am in complete agreement with you that 99% of books are crap. It's the 1% that you hopefully want to get around to reading, and those are typically not the easiest reads.

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

#268

Post by Brian_K_White »

bkandel wrote: post #174

> 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…

I didn't and don't know Russian and never even thought to try to look up anything like that.

The setting is a fictious future time and place. It's supposed to have words and other things that are different from your normal life.

I just assumed droogs and everything else were just made-up words and got their obvious meanings from context.

It's definitely not a neutral thing that a kid thinks that they way to deal with this is to see if chatgpt can translate it for them.

There will always be those people though so I don't know if it's an alarming facet of a whole population, or just the depressing but mundane fact that that has really always been most people. Still a bad thing, just maybe not a new or abnormal thing.

Or neither. Maybe it's not most people all along but it's certainly some percentage of people all along, and maybe that kid was just one of them that always has and always will exist, and nothing remarkable about it.

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

#269

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

functionmouse wrote: post #73
tomwheeler wrote: post #5

[flagged]

It's true; I also started reading the comments before clicking the article. Show of hands?

I actually read the article first, but I find it too long, and unnecessarily so. I am a huge proponent of reading, especially for the acquisition of new knowledge and perspectives, but I consider this form of writing rather entitled, beating around the bush and demanding too much of my time and attention just to make a point or two.

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

#270

Post by lapcat »

apparent wrote: post #256
lapcat wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reading is partly for edification Not necessarily. Is Harry Potter for edification? Trashy romance novels? In any case, the article specifically notes that reading for pleasure, a subset of all reading, has declined. > One conflated a time-consuming activity with a quick one, and the other conflated time periods of comparison. There was no conflation by the article. You presented a selective quotation that omitted…

Nit picking around the edges doesn't undermine the general point. The comparisons were bad. You have succeeded in pointing out that they were not as bad as they possibly could have been, which I guess makes you feel good? Anyway, I'll leave it here since I don't enjoy engaging with people like you on HN.

> The comparisons were bad.

The comparisons were fine. I guess it makes you feel good to tell yourself that I was "nit picking around the edges", but I was actually disagreeing with you 100%.

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