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Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

nbcnews.com

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Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#251

Post by jrflo »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #246
madaxe_again wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a really effective inoculation against the Skinner box 20+ years ago, when I became addicted to an MMO. It took my life utterly turning to shit and barely escaping being kicked out of university for me to wake up. Since, I’ve always been aware of and wary of the possibility of this kind of dopamine cycling. I see it in others. My wife discovered YouTube shorts a year or so ago, and now she’ll lose entire days t…

Yet you're still sat writing mini essays to strangers because of the dopamine hit....

I think drugs is an apt analogy. Hackernews is like alcohol, it definitely can be addicting but generally most people dont have a problem with it. Short form video is like meth

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#254

Post by blahaj »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #248
blks wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s devices but also parents. If parents don’t read books everyday, kids won’t either.

Why can't you read from a screen instead? Why do all the benefits of reading seemingly disappear when read from a display screen?

Most screens have distractions just one tap away.

Personally I also like the physics of a book a lot more for reading. Every book is a physically different object. You physically turn the page. You can physically see how far you are in the book. It's just all much less abstract and tangible.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#255

Post by CableNinja »

mnsc wrote: post #196
CableNinja wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What was the 'don't read the summaries' book?

Eversion by Alistair Reynolds

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#256

Post by kuerbel »

zhivota wrote: post #115

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 depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done.

It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#257

Post by rimliu »

jdw64 wrote: post #217

Realistically speaking, I also think of this as a kind of evolutionary process. It is about obtaining necessary information within the flood of information. I do think the amount of reading is important, but I also wonder whether unconditionally suppressing dopamine is the right approach. Wouldn't we become more vulnerable if we were raised in a sterile environment? I think the middle ground is important.

How do books equal sterile environment?

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#258

Post by blahaj »

zhivota wrote: post #115

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…

I don't know how old your kids are and if they play video games with friends, so maybe they're too young for this to begin with.

Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#259

Post by latentsea »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #202
encrypted_bird wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, come on... I have ADHD and love reading. No need to use that as a bludgeon. It's unnecessary...

Doesn't your ADHD interfere with sitting down and reading?

You misunderstand how it works. It's not "can't pay attention" like people think. It's "have difficultly directing attention". There's two different failure modes. One is "not interesting enough, so can't keep my attention focused on it" and the other is "too interesting, so can't take my attention off it". You'll find ADHDers that like reading probably read a lot.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#260

Post by simoncion »

kuerbel wrote: post #250
madaxe_again wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a really effective inoculation against the Skinner box 20+ years ago, when I became addicted to an MMO. It took my life utterly turning to shit and barely escaping being kicked out of university for me to wake up. Since, I’ve always been aware of and wary of the possibility of this kind of dopamine cycling. I see it in others. My wife discovered YouTube shorts a year or so ago, and now she’ll lose entire days t…

20 years ago? Aahh, good old World of Warcraft is my guess. Played far too much far too long myself.

> World of Warcraft

I was lucky(?) enough to have played enough RPG video games that had good stories and combat to be completely unimpressed with WoW when it came along. I got to level three or five or something, said to myself "Shit, this is boring." and never looked back.

That said, I put a ton of time into Guild Wars 2, so don't misinterpret this comment as me sneering at folks who did (or do) put a ton of time into WoW.

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