We? I'm pretty sure I've finished four books since February.
Why can’t we read anymore?
181–190 of 198 posts
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. This isn't just an internet-fueled lack of attention, it's how I've always read, and how I image most people read most of the time. The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than co…
> I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. That's a feature, not a bug. Limit your first reading to basic understanding of the plot and setting; ignore exploration of "deeper" themes until subsequent re-reads.
What I'm saying is that my eyes simply scan the words while I think of other things. There's no comprehension there, I'm just losing my place in the text.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#183I've read over 500 fiction books and 2000+ non-fiction. I've read many of the big thick classics like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Infinite Jest. I've kept a spreadsheet of all the books I've read somewhat like Art Garfunkel[1] (of Simon & Garfunkel music duo). I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc. With all that said, I'm not convi…
I cannot count what I have read. Growing up (6-12) I had no access to digital tech, apart from a BBC micro, no television, no comics, no games other than chess. The only available recreational activities were reading or spending time outdoors. I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "liter…
> you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds.
Wow, that is just horrendous.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
why, because you haven't done it? your tone certainly doesn't convince me you have much else as a point.
Well, no, I don't have MUCH else as a point. If you're reading that fast you probably not going to read as well. Obviously we're not going for perfect retention here but still. That's a ridiculous amount of text to go through in such a short span of time. I feel like at that point it starts being less about reading and more about adding numbers to a list. But I digress.
No, I was a huge bookworm as a kid and I read almost as much as that in the summers. It wasn't about racking up points, just pleasure reading. When you are reading for fun and not for learning, you can go for a lot longer without getting tired and skip all the boring parts. It's not that much different than burning through an entire season of your favorite TV show, or through an entire single-player game, in a weekend.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#185It's a skill. But unlike riding a bike, if you don't use it, you lose it. On the other hand, if you practice, it gets better. I started keeping track of my reading in 2011. Here's my history: 2011: 11 books 2012: 16 books 2013: 29 books 2014: 54 books 2015: 26 books (to date) I did this while not significantly changing my lifestyle. How? 1. I read to and from work. 45 min each way. 2. I read at lunch. 1 hr. 3. I chos…
Logging what you read is, oddly enough, a new idea for me. One I'll have to seriously consider doing. In 2003 I started college, and an exercise in a class I had we had to tell two truths and one falsehood and let the class guess the falsehood. I don't remember what the falsehood was or the other truth, but the truth one that everybody thought was the falsehood was that I had read over 2000 books. I only know that I…
10 books/yr x 20 years = 200, not 2,000.
Setting up a goodreads account is simplicity itself. And since it's owned by Amazon, you can import all your books with a click. There's also a bookmarklet that "Adds book to Goodreads" from the Amazon page.
Once you get used to logging progress and marking completed books, you will really see the pages and books mount up.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#186Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely redundant words and personal examples used only to set the tone. If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it? Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentr…
out of curiosity (seriously) which were the 5?
Ha! To be honest, I now can't even remember - and it's only a day later, so perhaps the true answer is zero.
There was some stuff about speed of dopamine response that was interesting. It aligned with some stuff about dopamine addiction by a guy called Charles Faraone who I'd been reading on Quora.
I did find his proposed solution interesting, but I'd have preferred it stated up front and then explained, rather than left until the final paragraphs by which point I'd lost attentiveness anyway.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not a huge fan of Medium.com, it has way too less content displayed per screen, way too huge font and one has to scroll all the way down to read anything, it is annoying , not to mention the huge images everwhere, which gives the images more importance than the content.
Agreed. Are there any websites that you really like the presentation?
I had read Sam Altman's blog on postheaven, I really liked that blogging platform, it is clean with more focus on the text content rather than the pictures.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot count what I have read. Growing up (6-12) I had no access to digital tech, apart from a BBC micro, no television, no comics, no games other than chess. The only available recreational activities were reading or spending time outdoors. I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "liter…
> you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds. Wow, that is just horrendous.
Yeah. Spending a year in the US education system was an eye-opener. Sciath (Science/Math) and Soclish (Social Studies & English) were the two topics. "Elite" school, 7th grade. Mindbleached kids, conformity was king, everything, everything resulted in hysterical breathlessness. Couldn't get out of there soon enough.
They really didn't know what to do with an 11 year old who would sit there reading Aristotle in ancient greek under the desk - apart from suspend me, repeatedly, and breathing a big sigh of relief when I told them to stick it and went back to school in the UK - they admitted that they would have expelled me had I not left... which reflects the American approach to problem solving - if you can't figure it out, pretend it doesn't exist.
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book. Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the…
I'm with you 100% on this. To me blog posts and internet articles are really good for getting insight into a particular issue you're currently having, or a to be exposed to a bit of interesting trivia. I find books to be far superior if you want to maximize your knowledge ingestion for a given set of time. I once tried to give somebody my C# 4.0 In a Nutshell book when I upgrade to the 5.0 book. "Why do I need that,…
"Why do I need that, I can just look at MSDN?"
MSDN has all of it, everything that should be documented. It is easy to get lost, not knowing what and how much should be taken first. The value of a book in such case is to have its author as your guide (as in a tutorial, if you will, but a little bit more than that).
Re: Why can’t we read anymore?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
why, because you haven't done it? your tone certainly doesn't convince me you have much else as a point.
Well, no, I don't have MUCH else as a point. If you're reading that fast you probably not going to read as well. Obviously we're not going for perfect retention here but still. That's a ridiculous amount of text to go through in such a short span of time. I feel like at that point it starts being less about reading and more about adding numbers to a list. But I digress.
You're assuming zaphar reads/comprehends the same way you do. I can't read that fast period, and if i'm reading fast don't comprehend as much, but I have first hand experience with how good zaphar's comprehension is when he is reading very fast. It has some to do with how deeply he concentrates by nature, something he was born with that I wasn't.