What's happening to reading?

The students in the study are responding in a rational way to the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their own work[^1]. The real task is then to flatter the teacher/professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work — and if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective, why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?

This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself: - one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs lumbering around London", because the authors think this language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced, there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or making fun of) that idea? - the authors criticize readers for relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other texts, especially old ones — does pulling from those make you a bad reader? - they say that a student only locates the fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than shipyards?)

I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text itself. But by the points students are in college they will have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal interpretations that don't produce the required result, and unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.

[^0] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-... [^1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...

None of the KB systems I've ever encountered, from orgs big and small, reputable or otherwise, had in them any useful information whatsoever. It's all just bullshit, roundabout sales, and a lot of answers to questions no actual human being would ever ask.

Whether or not to put LLM in the KB's search bar is immaterial. Myself, when I see a KA syste, I immediately close the tab and "bounce" back to the search engine.

> People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read!

Yes, but also because they don't trust you to provide enough information to diagnose and solve their problem. There's no point wasting the time when experience tells you most customer-facing KBs are nothing but false hope and misleading headlines.

> They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!*

Yes, but not because they hate that random support person - it's because it's the only remotely reliable way to solve the problem itself. Companies shouldn't complain, not after standardizing knowledgebases and phone menus, which are all implicitly and often explicitly designed to keep customers away from support staff - and instead of providing a solution, they're optimized to make the user think the solution exists somewhere and they're just too dumb to find it (therefore, user's own fault, not company's fault; customer's brand perception unaffected).

As for making it the support person's problem - that's literally their job. That's what they're paid for.