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What's happening to reading?

newyorker.com

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#61

Post by hluska »

easterncalculus wrote: post #13
nottorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even before "AI". Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...

Sorry but if we can't correlate learning to read with literacy we're not allowed to correlate anything at all. Comprehension is massive and the difference between college and 6th great reading comprehension is an ocean that influences whether people pick anything up or pass it to ChatGPT.

Sorry but that’s still not relevant. The article takes a totally different view on what’s happening. Other sides could be valid too but they’re not part of the article.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#62

Post by KPGv2 »

easterncalculus wrote: post #19
bmiekre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gave a literal LOL

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…

"AI can't understand this metaphor" isn't criticizing the thing you think it's criticizing.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#63

Post by ahamilton454 »

This was a pretty thoughtful piece and a pleasure to read. My gut reaction at first was that it was going to be some critque on children not reading due to generative ai (a cynial piece), but it was quite an interesting reflection on simply how reading is changing from the prepective of this author whose spent a his life deeply reading books

The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#64

Post by Filmatic »

ryandv wrote: post #28
anzumitsu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?

Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable.

A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms.

The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too.

I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#65

Post by dsign »

Once upon a time, reading and books were for the elites. The printing press and the Enlightenment changed that and, time passed, we got other forms of entertainment that required less and less mental investment. Now anybody can choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen. Maybe touching the inner mind of high-flying human thinkers will become a thing for the elites again, with the silver lining that access to books will be slightly less about how golden is one’s cradle.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#66

Post by KPGv2 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #55

I 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.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#68

Post by jihadjihad »

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.

It reminds me of the now-infamous article that ran in the New York Times a few years ago that argued we should remove the requirement to complete an Algebra course in order to earn a high school diploma.

The bar for any amount of academic discipline or rigor may as well be a stripe of masking tape on the floor.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#69

Post by zapw »

KPGv2 wrote: post #58
Spivak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is, students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English that they don't read, write, or speak; that makes reference and uses turns of phrase that would be well-understood by readers at the time but are archaic to a modern reader. If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the…

> students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English They were asked to read the opening chapter of Bleak House. It's pretty much standard English. > 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…

To understand the passage and what follows, it is actually important to know what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is. And to be clear, it's not an "inn" in the standard modern usage of the term, but rather a rather a professional association for lawyers.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#70

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

yesfitz wrote: post #31

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 e…

> BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance.

It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.

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