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What's happening to reading?

newyorker.com

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#31

Post by yesfitz »

This article provides a lot to think about.

To paraphrase some ideas poorly:

> "LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."

> "An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other."

The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#32

Post by andrepd »

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…

Lmao, this is the "swimming through molasses"? We're done for.

I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs are on their way to destroy what's left.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#33

Post by datadrivenangel »

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…

It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#34

Post by pitpatagain »

anzumitsu wrote: post #23
jasonthorsness wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

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

The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context.

Is it the easiest thing to read? No.

Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#35

Post by jazzypants »

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…

That's not unreadable, it's captivating!

Re: What's happening to reading?

#36

Post by jazzypants »

bee_rider wrote: post #27
easterncalculus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets worse too. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fiel…

The only tricky thing about the Dickens bit is that it uses that archaic meaning of “divers” that I’m only familiar with because of the Joanna Newsom time travel/romance/trench warfare/birds album.

God, I'm so happy I saw this live in concert. She is incredible.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#37

Post by androng »

Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the effort.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#38

Post by falcor84 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #33
jasonthorsness wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?

I for one absolutely agree that

reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water

Re: What's happening to reading?

#39

Post by sandy_coyote »

retskrad wrote: post #17

Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes th…

Despite this comment's dubiety, this is a good point. Text communication is only about 8,000 years old IIRC, which is quite recent in human development.
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