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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#181

Post by jraph »

smeej wrote: post #145

I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new. I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all. I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. Bu…

> walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words

Of course.

I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech.

What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.

Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth.

With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.

Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.

We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently.

For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#182

Post by AlanYx »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #18
easterncalculus wrote: post #11

One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.

“A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.” Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenbe…

There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part, that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded, circuitous style of the court.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#183

Post by barrkel »

beloch wrote: post #165
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…

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong. I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading. Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're…

And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here. Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles paid off.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#184

Post by whycome »

> These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration

Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#185

Post by KineticLensman »

bumby wrote: post #140
compacct27 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading, but misses that reading (as a process, a verb) can be the goal in itself, at least in terms of recreational reading. Summarization misses all that experience, just like reading the synopsis of a movie isn’t the same as viewing the art. I don’t want everything in my life to be just a rush to the ends, anymore than I’d want to trade the…

> I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading

Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#186

Post by timeinput »

nemomarx wrote: post #168
beloch wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong. I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading. Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're…

Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?

I mean I read the New Yorker OP article because it was posted on hacker news, and highly voted. It was probably too short to be considered long form, but I feel like I was baited into reading a rambling article where I gained nothing of value other than at best a summary of other peoples thoughts, where the only conclusion I can practically draw with out reading a lot more is "Joshua Rothman and others don't like how people are consuming content".

Re: What's happening to reading?

#187

Post by rpdillon »

whycome wrote: post #184

> These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.

This has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times.

https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs

Re: What's happening to reading?

#188

Post by roadside_picnic »

Interestingly enough Claude has me reading much more. Especially with math books, one of the greatest challenges to self-study can be making sure you are in fact getting the concepts correct. Without this it's easy to get fairly deep into a book only to give up once you realize you haven't quite built the picture in your head right. Often you do get it, but it takes multiple re-reads/alternate views of the problem.

With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding. When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my learning and has me reading much more these days.

Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations, especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment of a subject.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#189

Post by bruce343434 »

jihadjihad wrote: post #80
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."

To add to the depression, I wonder how many respondents thought that "nineteenth century" == 1900s.

Ain't It Awful

Re: What's happening to reading?

#190

Post by MichaelRo »

ssttoo wrote: post #59
MichaelRo wrote: post #25

Well, when I was a kid in the 80s in communist Romania, life was a lot similar to 19th century than what someone in Western countries was experiencing. No TV (obviously no computers), so most significant form of entertainment came from reading primarily. I never read "classics" or the books that were on school's compulsory list but I did read anything I could get my hands on and looked entertaining. I recall seeing t…

Similar experience in neighboring Bulgaria. I remember my dad being upset with me for wasting my time reading “readable little books” (my best effort at approx. translation) meaning fiction, as opposed to proper textbooks.

Times have changed. My kid and the kids of every friend I know around me, have never opened a book on their own volition. Ever. Although they open the phone, tablet and laptop many times a day.

And it's not like they're stupid or anything, just have no desire to read, never learned to associate reading with something pleasurable.

But ... it shows. Like a friend has a kid who took the national exam that marks the end of secondary school (gymnasium) this year. He told me one question that was asked. Basically a conversation between John and George, John asking "George, will you start working or continue wasting your time doing nothing?", and George replies: "Right now I'm going to get the scissors to cut some leaves for the dogs". Question was, "What will George do? a) Start working or b) Continue wasting his time".

Kid chose "a) Start working" because as he argued, he goes after scissors and uses them to cut leaves, which is work. Asked my kid the same question, got the same answer: he'll start working. Well, but if they would have read a few books, they would have encountered the Romanian expression "cutting leaves to the dogs" as an idiom for laziness, lack of work, doing nothing. So they don't read anymore and it shows.

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