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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#191

Post by photonthug »

mvdtnz wrote: post #167
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…

I think that you're greatly overstating the point. > But 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. I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.

I don't know. Talking with strangers is always kind of insane, or at least a pretty illogical leap of faith, because there's not much chance that the interaction is interesting or amusing. Now a stranger that walks up to me and demands some dramatic reading of Paradise Lost, stat? Ok, I'm intrigued, hold my beer and buckle up while I let you hear about regions of sorrow and darkness visible because the produce section has never seen some shit like this

Re: What's happening to reading?

#192

Post by bee_rider »

allturtles wrote: post #164
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.

> I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum in high school is built around reading particular works by particular historical writers. The highlights of nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered in high school (and beyond - some of these people are seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember any works or authors…

I guess that’s true.

Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of course)—I tutored folks in an “math for non-stem majors” sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer to their material than the math students, who’d all long ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point they started asking about foils, which was pretty confusing (they weren’t looking for anachronistically named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic for applying the distributive property twice, which I’d never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing directly.

I wonder if these college English students have similarly forgotten some names? I guess that’s sort of a long shot. I do think memorization of facts should be avoided, though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the underlying principle into your mental model instead.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#193

Post by interestica »

I saw an example recently of a sort of “AI Codec” : A person has to send a message to a respected figure of authority. They organize their thoughts and requests into a clear and concise bulleted list with explanations. But, that seemed heavily informal and unprofessional. So they used AI to convert the bullets to paragraphs and sent it out.

The authority received the large body of text but, due to time commitments and attention, they didn’t have time to read it all. They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#194

Post by HellDunkel »

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…

A great perspective but one problem remains: AI will radically change the book market. Great new books will be even harder to find as we are drowning in a sea of words. How do we stay afloat?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#195

Post by SoftTalker »

barrkel wrote: post #183
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…

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.

Any good sources for longform articles?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#196

Post by SoftTalker »

HellDunkel wrote: post #194
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…

A great perspective but one problem remains: AI will radically change the book market. Great new books will be even harder to find as we are drowning in a sea of words. How do we stay afloat?

There are more great books written before 2022 than a person could read in a lifetime. Stick with those.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#197

Post by StefanBatory »

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…

... if I was asked by a stranger to read a page of book for them out of blue in a store, I'd be staring dumbfounded, questioning whether everything's alright with them.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#198

Post by SoftTalker »

YinglingHeavy wrote: post #124
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

And also real porn.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#199

Post by jiehong »

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…

Just like you wouldn’t summarise a poem.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#200

Post by StefanBatory »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #26
anzumitsu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizz…

I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it.

Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird.

Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture.

Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.

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