51–60 of 310 posts
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…
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.
30 years ago, that was the only option to read from. So people did it. Now people are not at mercy of these intellectual longform masturbators.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is an attitude I had when I was 19 and had spent a bunch of time and money going to school. I had a life event that made me leave school and take on a huge debt that had to be paid. Most people learn - they just learn in context of their necessity and their own passions. For other things, they lean on the community around them (doctors, lawyers, accountants, software engineers etc...)
> AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning.
I'm watching the huddled masses start to figure it out. AI is going to be to arrogant intellectualism what the gun was to the knight. Now anyone who can operate a mobile phone (and literacy is not required) has access to a shocking level of expertise and contextualized knowledge. And as AI improves this will be more and more the case.
> constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary
First prompts of non developer employees were "what does ___ mean?". Real time vocabulary is a thing now.
> “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.
It's not a joke. AI is going to reshape society. It's just started. Back to the gun analogy - the knights are just now starting to realize that proficiency with a sword and 70kg of armor are no match for a peasant with a pistol. Likewise, I suspect that Joe six-pack with AI in his pocket can do knowledge work at a "way good enough" level. I don't want to accept it, but that seems to be reality.
Ed West’s longstanding intellectual project is fairly conventional reactionary/retvrn/conservative pessimism, and he has no particular technology background of all to speak of. 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…
He essentially advocates for a society that has the attributes that he accuses oral culture of: conservative, repetitive, static, lacking innovation.
What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various information feeds with blog posts, news articles, and projects relevant to my interests and the moment. I've come to prefer a more raw exposition of other people's thoughts. It seems partly in the interest of credibility; more spontaneous writing offers a richer surface area to judge the quality of thought. And finding it in a place where other people are free to critique and engage with those thoughts means that I'm not locked into just one voice. I also have the opportunity to engage myself which fundamentally changes how actively I think about it.
I'm open to the idea that the shift has come at a cost. There is value to reading something that someone has put a lot of work into and in large quantities. But the days when I felt it was enough to just passively let information flow over me seem to be over; it is a luxury I can't afford.
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…
Why did you use so many words? You could’ve made the same point with at most half the amount of sentences.
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.…
I disagree with this take so strongly. Yes, in practice people are lazy and they're just going to ask for the answer. But the potential for AIs to give targeted answers to specific questions about academic topics is so far ahead of anything I had going through undergrad or my master's program that it would be an epic missed opportunity not to leverage it in the educational process. I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.
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?
I cannot imagine this is an actual trend that's preventing people from reading, so please bring a couple citations.
Reading has been on the decline for more than a decade, far beyond when AI was invented. I'll go with the 2008 Steve Jobs quote:
> In January 2008, Steve Jobs famously claimed that "people don’t read anymore," specifically asserting that 40 percent of Americans read one book or less the previous year.
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…
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.…
As a society, we have this silly habit of dismissing criticisms of incoming societal shifts because previous ones “turned out fine”. We grab the most extreme of the bad contrarian takes of the time and use it to ridicule the position as a whole. We often ignore those previous shifts were influenced by the criticisms of the time (not all of them bad) and that how it turned out was a result of the push and pull.
In other words, we need to have the people pointing out the bad parts of the change, to have any chance that it’ll actually turn out good.
Another thing often ignored is that shifts are happening more frequently and at larger scales, and we’ve seen them become out of control. All the more reason to take a breather a move slower.