Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's happening to reading?

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 334 posts

Re: What's happening to reading?

#81

Post by easterncalculus »

allturtles wrote: post #77
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.

Not just university students, but English majors [0]. [0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."

Yep, English majors, and on top of that the study was done in 2015, which is not just pre-ChatGPT but pre-TikTok.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#82

Post by allturtles »

zapw wrote: post #69
KPGv2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can figure out from later context that it's some kind of legal institution with an associated court. The students were also allowed to look things up: "Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource" [0]

[0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346

Re: What's happening to reading?

#83

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

sandy_coyote wrote: post #39
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.

You can knock off a few millennia there, and if you want to include most of the population, barely a century or two.

Literacy was needed to read the Bible and operate machinery, and now we have videos for that. Only (some of) the video makers need to read, so they can raid the libraries for material.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#84

Post by nsriv »

KPGv2 wrote: post #66
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 .

Exactly this. On the less artistic side, I've seen so many critiques of popular self-help books for being anecdote heavy and people sharing (or even selling!) summaries of the key bullet points, and the whole point is to develop a resonance with the author to drive home the point. Otherwise it's now just a listicle.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#85

Post by kjkjadksj »

sandy_coyote wrote: post #39
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.

Now ask how old working a sedentary 9-5 is

Re: What's happening to reading?

#86

Post by dehrmann »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #57
androng wrote: post #37

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…

That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick…

> Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe

Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but running a hedge fund.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#87

Post by easterncalculus »

Spivak wrote: post #47
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 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…

This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characters do, which isn't true either. They had trouble then too, but (fewer) people could still do it. Now it's a stone wall.

Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#88

Post by genewitch »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3

Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read. Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.

there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember.

I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#90

Post by 0xffff2 »

jcranmer wrote: post #60
0xffff2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.

Per Wikipedia, Michaelmas term tends to around in mid-December, not in mid-November.

Well then I guess it was an unseasonably warm December that year? Or perhaps the dates have changed? Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that it makes a significant difference to the story.
Post reply on HN