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What's happening to reading?

newyorker.com

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#121

Post by pessimizer »

Animats wrote: post #113

From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain,…

People are so much more literate than they were even a short time ago. Having to type in order to participate on the internet and the Harry Potter phenomenon both seriously upgraded world literacy in general.

edit:

> [...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.

Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to 100%

Re: What's happening to reading?

#122

Post by bigthymer »

jollyllama wrote: post #109
dehrmann wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think his game is no longer about developing analytical skill to be the best investor, but becoming the person who has access to high level people and gets actionable information on an international scale before others.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#123

Post by compacct27 »

asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome.

Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge

Re: What's happening to reading?

#124

Post by YinglingHeavy »

asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Reddit is trivia porn

Re: What's happening to reading?

#125

Post by bregma »

bee_rider wrote: post #93
allturtles wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just university students, but English majors [0]. [0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."

I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers, and my list will quickly start to include folks who are more mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage that we literally use equations named after these guys! Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Gustav Eiffel? Robert Stephenson? Nikola Tesla? Alexander Graham Bell? Orville and Wilbur Wright? Thomas Edison?

I guess it depends on how much you honour those who lit the way before you.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#127

Post by andoando »

0xffff2 wrote: post #56
jcranmer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.

Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.

How does November help? I don't even remember the academic terms from my college 10 years ago, how am I supposed to accurately know how academic terms worked a century ago in England?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#128

Post by andoando »

jerf wrote: post #114
datadrivenangel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?

The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means. In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college . Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect…

I guess I would not have done much better.

>Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

>Facilitator: >O.K.

>Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere.

What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#129

Post by bee_rider »

bregma wrote: post #125
bee_rider wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers, and my list will quickly start to include folks who are more mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage that we literally use equations named after these guys! Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Gustav Eiffel? Robert Stephenson? Nikola Tesla? Alexander Graham Bell? Orville and Wilbur Wright? Thomas Edison? I guess it depends on how much you honour those who lit the way before you.

FWIW I (incorrectly, I guess) thought of Tesla and Edison as early 20’th century instead of 19’th.

The Wright brothers just barely squeeze by the “19’th century” bar.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#130

Post by yannyu »

compacct27 wrote: post #123
asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome. Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figure…

It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to.

"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.

How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.

I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.

The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.

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