151–160 of 350 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bar isn’t dropping, it’s shifting.
Shifting to a position below where it previously was? I don't get your point... Is there's a new bar? What would you say the new expectation is that doesn't build on previous core skills?
It's worse than this. I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT). These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I…
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos? I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rot…
Reading, writing, and math are foundational skills that, aside from having enormous utility in their own right, are also crucial for developing sharp, creative, and analytical minds.
Take writing as an example: it challenges you to organize your thoughts, patch up the weaknesses of your arguments, and find effective means of connecting with your audience. In so doing, you restructure your own understanding of the world, deepening your expertise and mental schemas. That's something an LLM can't do.
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> these days Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
Funnily enough, smart phones (and previous feature phones with their SMS) have probably gotten more people into reading and writing for leisure than any other technology since the printing press. Granted, people are not doing any long form reading and writing on these devices, but they are reading and writing.
This activity has largely disappeared.
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I mean it’s obviously not just that otherwise we’d make every kid play the original Donkey Kong and call that a success
The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived…
One of the things though is when most peopley play SMB 1-3 today, they're playing with input lag. Mario Wonder was designed with input lag in mind, SMB 1 was not and it increases the difficulty.
Mario Wonder lets you choose to use invulnerable characters, etc. There was only one level I remember needing to try many times to beat. OTOH, there's lots of difficult levels in smb 1...
Recommendations? What are you reading? I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more. It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i th…
LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.
I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.
We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort. We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We ar…
It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids. You see too many parents and grandparents buried on the phones. At least with boomers the tech adoption isnt as high We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort. We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We ar…
Are we surprised? Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura. Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement. The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
It’s absolutely a bad thing, and there’s extensive research demonstrating it
Now that technology CAN give us content at faster speeds, isn't it better for the brains to change to adapt to the short form cycles? Otherwise you'll be left behind stuck on topic one when the new generation have absorbed 1, 2, 3, 4. etc.
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading. My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not. Why is reading for fun something that's wor…
Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.
However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.
I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.
Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure. Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.