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I Learned to Read Again

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Re: I Learned to Read Again

#31

Post by Barrin92 »

Jtarii wrote: post #10
HumanEater wrote: post #2

Screen addiction is a thing for me, I'm addicted to my phone computer and tv and i don't know how to manage it. I know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff

The easiest way to counter it is just leave your phone at home and take a book and go to a public bench and read. You will quickly condition your brain to no longer need to constantly be looking at a screen to be happy. Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.

>Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.

I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.

People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.

If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#32

Post by colechristensen »

buzzwords wrote: post #27
colechristensen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audiobooks sped up to ~2x or so, but you usually have to build up to that speed. There are also exercises which help develop short term memory like n-back training for which there are many phone apps.

Oh you don't zone out?

The speed helps with that.

Also doing something mindless helps. The dishes, the laundry, moderate exercise.

I can't pay attention to most audiobooks at 1x, I get bored between words.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#33

Post by colechristensen »

HumanEater wrote: post #2

Screen addiction is a thing for me, I'm addicted to my phone computer and tv and i don't know how to manage it. I know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff

Observe the sabbath.

Not in a religious way, just have a no screens day every week, once a month, or just once.

You can get by one day without texting, looking for directions, getting an answer from google, ordering takeout, etc. etc. etc. Set yourself a boundary, no phones unless there's a fire or somebody needs to go to the hospital and stick to it. Make a schedule.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#34

Post by xphos »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12
pseudonymidy wrote: post #7

Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history? I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesti…

> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently underst…

I think the major difference is that this article describes some meta concept. Despite being abstract its very concrete. If 2 people read something that is fantasy or even describing a physical process like wood carving. Despite reading the same thing both parties have an entirely different picture of what happened. The clothes on the people are different, the building they occupy is different, the wood you are carving is different, the tools you use are different. These difference are actually the most increasing details which your brain fills in, and this is something completely different from when you watch TV. All the details are filled its concrete and non-abstract. It can still be a compeling story or piece of art but often people are are much worst artist and visual things rarely capture all the things your brain can fill in for detail that make something cohesive. And the details they fill in are often details your brain finds mundane and ignores entirely.

I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#35

Post by loughnane »

colechristensen wrote: post #30
loughnane wrote: post #28

> I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve. This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies. His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my…

My favorite part of How to Read a Book is how it classifies books into books worth skimming over, books worth reading each word exactly once, and books worith studying and actively engaging with in depth. How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.

I’ve read it a few times both on my own and with my kids. I could maybe buy 50-60% of the length would be ideal, but not 10%.

Ironically, one of the points made in the book—and close to your point—is that even in the greatest book of all time there are passages that are more and less worthwhile. The art of being a good reader is identifying the worthwhile and going over it slowly (maybe even rereading it) and identifying the less worthy and going over it quick.

The nice thing about spending more time with HTRAB is it forces you to think about reading. That’s a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#36

Post by hx8 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #23
pseudonymidy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not familiar with the research but I will say that conclusion “feels” right to me. Have they found a modern day metric that we should all be hunting in our quest for reading health? A literary equivalent to the daily 10,000 steps? Maybe 10,000 words!

There is also a weird, robust mortality relationship where book readers live longer than periodical readers "regardless of gender, health, wealth, or education" [1]. In those studies, the threshold was 30 minutes of book reading a day. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/

While this is just a rule of thumb, I consider moderate exercise, reading, and socializing to be roughly equivalent in positive health benefits. I try to get a little bit of each every day, and then try to have longer sessions of each once or twice a week.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#37

Post by nemomarx »

Barrin92 wrote: post #31
Jtarii wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest way to counter it is just leave your phone at home and take a book and go to a public bench and read. You will quickly condition your brain to no longer need to constantly be looking at a screen to be happy. Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.

>Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted. I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people…

The simplest version of this, which I did myself, is just to have less food in the house. Stop buying snacks, only get items you have a planned meal for, and you spend a lot less willpower resisting the temptation to grab stuff while you're already in the kitchen or etc.

It's harder to modify what restaurants and online orders are available to you, but maybe you can work up to blocking or uninstalling those apps or something?

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#38

Post by Nevermark »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12
pseudonymidy wrote: post #7

Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history? I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesti…

> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently underst…

How could less correlated reading, no matter how high the quality, possibly compare to a solid book - in use of time or depth of impact?

The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.

Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.

If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, with lower correlations of who finds them, reads them, and when, the page count would have to increase 10x - 100x. The setups and redundancy would be immense.

Books also get to explore many perspectives on the same important ideas. Which is not redundancy. It is the difference between recognizing a good idea and understanding it.

Feeling an epiphany vs. absorbing its implications. Awareness vs. fluency.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#39

Post by confidantlake »

buzzwords wrote: post #27
colechristensen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audiobooks sped up to ~2x or so, but you usually have to build up to that speed. There are also exercises which help develop short term memory like n-back training for which there are many phone apps.

Oh you don't zone out?

Try going for a walk when listening to an audiobook. When I do that I rarely zone out. When I don't I nearly always zone out.

Re: I Learned to Read Again

#40

Post by alana314 »

I found Amazon's Whispersync (audiobook + ebook synced) helpful for keeping me engaged in books in the smartphone era. This is a plug, but I made my own epub + text to speech reader for iOS for keeping myself engaged in reading, and have been reading/listening to classics such as Crime and Punishment this way: https://heard.quest/
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