I really don't get what is the point of articles such as this one. Maybe writers should focus on writing less bloated articles with clear prupose and AI reading would be unnecessary or at least not as frequent. At least there could be some claim or hypothesis, some evidence or counter-evidence, but this is just a string of weakly related observations without any real overarching explanation. Just a mind dump or barf.
What's happening to reading?
261–270 of 334 posts
Re: What's happening to reading?
#262Earlier 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…
It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to. "Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field. How…
My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics, even people talked about in the submission, popping in and thoroughly debunking all the bullshit the submission itself has.
Of course, there's also commenters posting uninformed bullshit on the submission topic without actually reading the submission. But, again from experience, those comments have tell-tale smells, which you learn to recognize.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously deadly when it floods. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0].
The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy.
[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
Re: What's happening to reading?
#264I think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will supercharge this. New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who other…
> New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point .
I think the fixation on specific expressions being essential to understanding and appreciating something doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You're picking the most extreme case; but even then, if the alternative is between someone reading a summary of a poem and not reading anything about it at all then the summary is infinitely better.
If you read a translation of the Odyssey you can still gain a deep appreciation for the story. Do you think people from Homer's era would've lamented that people were reading the Odyssey instead of hearing it performed live? To my understanding, this was historically considered a key part of the Odyssey. The changing of modalities isn't something new.
Can you only appreciate the Tao Te Ching if you understand Chinese? This is one of the most deeply poetic works with multiple layers of meaning and interpretations. If you want to take a fully academic approach you can read literal translations of each character with side-by-side definitions and explanations. But I believe reading a translation can still convey the soul of the work.
For a more modern example: many people lament the proliferation of Let's Play videos on YouTube, where people record themselves playing through various games. Surely some would lament that you're missing the point by not playing through games yourself, but if the alternative is never having experienced the game and story, then maybe videos make a reasonable compromise.
If god appeared before you dressed as a beggar in the streets to give you life changing advice, I suspect that most would disregard it. The way in which a message is packaged is important, and not everyone is prepared to receive a message in any form, so it's best to meet them halfway and present it in a way that they can access.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around. Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around. Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if na…
This seems like something way beyond reading comprehension though. Personally, and this is not a knock on you, but I don't find any of that imagined perception to be interesting/valuable. All this sentence is saying to me is that the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city.
Comprehension is a spectrum that starts somewhere superficial and merely "adequate" but also stretches into deeper literacy/fluency. On one end of the spectrum it is about reading between the lines, but that doesn't mean it's purely subjective nonsense. As for whether it's interesting or valuable, if you want to stay on the surface that's fine, but it's a narrow point of view to imagine that's all that is there.
Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Re: What's happening to reading?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case. I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was goin…
You must be the org that operates this mysterious, legendary KB system that has any actual information in it. 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 im…
As a counter point, I’ve read through more than one knowledge base systems I found perfectly sufficient for answering my questions
Re: What's happening to reading?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
You overlooked one crucial fact. > 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. They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment yo…
This. If someone sends me a full page email, I immediately skip it. No time for that. They'll follow up more concisely when it becomes important. Or if it requires such elaborate description, a phone call or meeting would have probably been a better channel for this communication. Likewise, anytime I start typing an email and it gets lengthy I know I'd be better off picking up the phone/scheduling a call.
I’m sorry, but you can’t find five minutes (if even) to read an email? No way your day-to-day life is so completely composed of things demanding your full attention that you don’t have a couple minutes to read an email. You typed out this comment, presumably after reading the thread. Surely you have time if someone you know sent you an email. You could read it in the time it takes to brush your teeth.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#268I'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…
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Re: What's happening to reading?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to. "Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field. How…
My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics,…
OP. Yep. I wanted to read an article on this topic. When I read this one, I wanted more perspective. I know where to go for that, so here we are.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.“ Alan Watts
Conversely (or a corollary?), comparing one's prose to a symphony is considered a...unusually high bar to meet.
I think you've missed the point of the quote. It's not an analogy to prose, per se, but merely stating that you don't need to just "get to the point" and, instead, can enjoy a work throughout. A symphony isn't inherently good, it was just the metaphor of choice Alan Watts chose to convey that we should be able to enjoy living our lives without constantly thinking of constant improvement.
That said, I do also think you can apply it to the enjoyment of prose in that you don't need to read it, tapping your fingers, waiting for some climax and then a minor denouement, expressing frustration if "the point" seems to be taking to long to get to. Certainly there is a lot of bad writing that can be overly verbose/messy/in need of editing/etc. and, depending on the nature of the writing, attempting to write "artful" prose can be a misstep. But, often, I find that you can find great pieces of prose in an essay/article/novel/etc. that are well-composed, sometimes profound, and a general joy to read. Though, judging by many of the comments in this thread, many don't care to read that way.