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Doomscrolling ourselves to death

edwest.co.uk

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Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#71

Post by phoghed »

foruhar wrote: post #61
CrimsonRain wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: books Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly. I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page. However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible. It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.

I feel like the authors of many non-fiction books (e.g. business, self-help) are told that they must write a 320 page book, even if the core is, at most twenty, pages. I guess it needs to look plump on the shelf at the airport or something. Dale Carnegie got a lot across in a small number of pages. Today he’d have to do 320 pages or maybe even two books one on making friends and one influencing people. I wouldn’t min…

Yeah. Like I’m already here bro, you don’t need to spend 50% of the book trying to convince me your ideas are worth considering

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#72

Post by aerhardt »

watwut wrote: post #59
aerhardt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Viral article from atlantic proves exactly nothing. And claim that students cant read is, frankly, idiotic.

Is this your idea of an intelligent contribution to the conversation?

There is plenty of evidence in the article from real professors at real universities (ex: Princeton), saying that they’ve had to dramatically cut reading workloads from humanities courses. I’ve heard similar things from European universities.

Other hard evidence is in plummeting reading comprehension scores in many countries that participate in PISA.

In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.

And all you have to contribute is that this is “idiotic”? The irony. Inform yourself.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#73

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Crabber wrote: post #63
mplanchard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?

The fucking article. Or you could imagine a more polite alternative.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#75

Post by tonyedgecombe »

iNerdier wrote: post #45

‘… many tech titans, Steve Jobs in particular, limit the amount of technology their children access…‘ Is he not aware that Mr. Jobs has been dead for over a decade?

Yeah but he didn’t unlock his kids locked down devices before he left.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#76

Post by snazz »

rpdillon wrote: post #57
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.…

> 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) 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…

Very few people have the discipline to use it in that way rather than as a way to remove friction, just as practically no one with a smartphone doesn’t, at least occasionally, find themselves “sucked in”.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#77

Post by bee_rider »

smokel wrote: post #40
estearum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Breaking “social” up into networking (connecting to my friends: MySpace, old Facebook) and media (social-graph recommended content: TikTok, current Facebook mostly)… the former might stick around. But the latter seems pretty vulnerable to learning model generated content, right? Social media might not exist in a couple decades or might be seen as sort of primitive stepping-stone on the path to algorithmically-generated entertainment media.

Which will probably be quite bad, but then, influencer-generated entertainment media was quite bad, so maybe we won’t be too much worse off.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#78

Post by pwillia7 »

ljf wrote: post #32
shubhamjain wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Plato was suspicious of writing even lol

https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#80

Post by CrimsonRain »

foruhar wrote: post #61
CrimsonRain wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: books Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly. I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page. However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible. It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.

I feel like the authors of many non-fiction books (e.g. business, self-help) are told that they must write a 320 page book, even if the core is, at most twenty, pages. I guess it needs to look plump on the shelf at the airport or something. Dale Carnegie got a lot across in a small number of pages. Today he’d have to do 320 pages or maybe even two books one on making friends and one influencing people. I wouldn’t min…

I was reading this book "Why Greatness Can't be Planned". Very interesting concept. From some startup SWE as well. Contains quite a few topics I wanted to read about but even for a "thin" 130 pages book, it is still needlessly padded; could have been half the pages and not miss anything.
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