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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#101

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

genewitch wrote: post #88
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read. Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.

there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember. I haven't used chatgpt (or what…

They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#102

Post by libraryatnight »

KPGv2 wrote: post #66
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #55

I think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will supercharge this. New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who other…

> New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point .

Most people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you are doing and they get testy when you point it out.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#103

Post by easterncalculus »

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #98
easterncalculus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characte…

> Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.

Yes, he was popular, and his works still weren't as easy to read as some of his contemporaries and many authors before and after him. That's not nonsense, that's reality.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#104

Post by allturtles »

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #98
easterncalculus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characte…

> Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.

How are these statements contradictory?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#105

Post by Der_Einzige »

jghn wrote: post #94
androng wrote: post #37

Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now…

I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers. And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exa…

The real red pill is realizing that Jared Diamond's "guns, germs, and steel" was no more accurate or historical than the shit that Foucault was writing 30 years before

Re: What's happening to reading?

#106

Post by Der_Einzige »

chrisweekly wrote: post #20
retskrad wrote: post #17

Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes th…

Your comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're willing to share.

It's trivial to get an LLM to write a comment of this kind of quality. Good writing means nothing anymore.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#107

Post by mindwok »

androng wrote: post #37

Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now…

Many non fiction books are too long, I agree. But there’s also something lost when you treat these books as “extract lesson as fast as possible and move on”. There’s a joy sometimes in engaging with the material and taking your time.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#108

Post by easterncalculus »

allturtles wrote: post #104
dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.

How are these statements contradictory?

They aren't. A run-on, 70 word sentence for example wasn't easier to store in your head, or not require the occasional second read-through back then . Readers then still had to go through all of that. This "it's just outdated" idea is employed primarily to hand-wave poor literacy performance and reading requirements.

Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and has a lot of the same difficulty, but people don't call it 'outdated' or treat it like a foreign language. These are just books you have to read slower than a news article, and that's alright, but there's a fine line between needing more time and not being able to get through it. That study showed it conclusively.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#109

Post by jollyllama »

dehrmann wrote: post #86
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick…

> Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but running a hedge fund.

I'd be intrigued to hear the argument fully flushed out for once. The Dalio worship after the "principles" exposés is baffling but at the same time he does appear objectively successful.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#110

Post by ralfd »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #105
jghn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers. And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exa…

The real red pill is realizing that Jared Diamond's "guns, germs, and steel" was no more accurate or historical than the shit that Foucault was writing 30 years before

The real red pill is always in the comments/blog posts:

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-pet...

> You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. > Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers > [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama

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