11–20 of 309 posts
There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me.
I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities.
We have a big problem.
The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.
No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had l…
https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...
We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes.
AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)
The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had l…
But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.
I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had l…
For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in.
Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had l…
> Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to th…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had l…
It is slightly dismissive, since we see degradation of literacy within the past 20 years. https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo... We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes. AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning.…
AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.