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Doomscrolling ourselves to death

edwest.co.uk

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Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#21

Post by bdangubic »

blfr wrote: post #19

The not-reading part is seriously starting to sound like lamenting the death of the epos. Yeah, there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets. 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…

> 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

All would be well with the World if this was actually true…

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#22

Post by coffeefirst »

sgt wrote: post #18

I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop. It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?

Wait, really?

As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#23

Post by mplanchard »

kichimi wrote: post #7
smokel wrote: post #2

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…

I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube. "Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"

This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#24

Post by estearum »

smokel wrote: post #6
estearum wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were stupid people back then and there are still stupid people now, wouldn't the interesting thing be to look at what's different?

There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill. Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, o…

> There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill.

Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best.

> Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?

Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#25

Post by sgt »

coffeefirst wrote: post #22
sgt wrote: post #18

I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop. It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?

Wait, really? As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.

It's better with properly published titles but even those writers are increasingly using AI and leaks into their works.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#26

Post by Stitch4223 »

> Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.

That’ll teach them.

Jokes aside, reading something doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I think people read more than ever. Subtitles, captions, social media posts, source code. Most of it is jank.

> people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture

Reads like unsourced depressionwave slop. First source that comes to mind: https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocu...

Assuming memory capacity would yield the best decisions and best leadership ignores charisma, personal life experience, sociopathy, interdependence, society, uncertainty about the future and more.

You can’t be too literate and educated: it’s a rat race / status race like any other.

Even if the classics and history siphon into modern productions such as Hades.

> The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.

Cultural accessibility is at an all time high. Next to oceans of entertaining things more optimized for consumption it’s hard to stay relevant.

Expertise and being able to rely on others with expertise is more valuable than requiring every leader to have read the classics or being part of some intellectual elite. Knowing things is awesome mainly because it’s fast and helps with survival.

Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.

Edit: wrong any/every

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#27

Post by dag11 »

samuraijack wrote: post #8

Sorry for being pedantic but content like “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” is not doom scrolling. Is it low quality use of your time, sure, but it’s not doom scrolling

I've noticed a usage shift in the last few years. In 2020, "doomscrolling" originally meant to be stuck scrolling at all the doom-y posts we were bombarded with as the world fell apart around us. As things "stabilized" in the last few years, I've noticed that everyone and myself still tends to use "doomscrolling" even just for when we're stuck, locked in place, scrolling low quality content.

I figure in ten years when someone asks what "doomscrolling" means, we'll probably just shrug and say it means scrolling away to our doom.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#28

Post by estearum »

smokel wrote: post #17
RobotToaster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#29

Post by catchnear4321 »

smokel wrote: post #2

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…

> There are still stupid people now.

Some even equate attention discipline to intelligence of all things.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#30

Post by Jtariiiii »

kichimi wrote: post #7
smokel wrote: post #2

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…

I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube. "Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"

The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed.

The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.

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