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Doomscrolling ourselves to death

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Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#31

Post by aerhardt »

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…

One of the reasons why we read less long-form, according to a bunch of cognitive science studies and to my own anecdotal experience, is because our attention is shot.

A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.

The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.

Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#32

Post by ljf »

shubhamjain wrote: post #15
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 used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology. 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.…

That is also true for me on struggling to complete books, but don't forget when books first become cheap there were letters to the newspapers deploring that young people were reading rather than 'living' by talking with friends or going to the theatre.

I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#33

Post by Jtariiiii »

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?

AI generated text isn't so hard to detect that people could get away with it. As long as you are reading a well reviewed book the chance of AI slop is very low.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#34

Post by mplanchard »

smokel wrote: post #20
intended wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

My point is exactly that comparing some variation within 20 years with to a 1000 year period makes little sense. Sure, our collective literacy might be decreasing now, but perhaps it was a bit too high to begin with? Leaders of a country are not the majority. The article makes quite a few of these categorical mistakes. AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works…

AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning. Research on broader populations so far is not so hopeful, with most people using it to avoid learning. This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.

As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.

Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?

But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.

And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.

Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.

The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#35

Post by larodi »

There's another perspective - everyone and his dog today is reading more than ever because of LLMs (which are really LCPs in 2026 considering the machinery embeds all kinds of concepts in tokens). We ingest more information, condensed or not, than the average PHD scholar did mere 20-30 years ago. That is... by all measures - a lot.

And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book.

And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so.

* ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#36

Post by fauxclore »

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…

This take made me reel back, and shows a disregard for what longform content can do that shorts and tweets can't.

Maybe you have only been reading the wrong books.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#37

Post by aerhardt »

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…

Like I said in another comment, this famous article by the Atlantic [1] has pretty convincing testimony that kids studying the humanities at elite universities can't read either.

I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around.

I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#38

Post by coffeefirst »

sgt wrote: post #25
coffeefirst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity what book did you get burned on?

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#39

Post by marliechiller »

coffeefirst wrote: post #11

I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. 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…

Do you have examples of what weird stuff they would say? Im having a hard time imagining what you mean exactly.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#40

Post by smokel »

estearum wrote: post #28
smokel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For all we know social media will emerge across another 6,000 year timeframe. I think we're going in circles :)
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