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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#91

Post by PaulHoule »

genewitch wrote: post #88
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 what…

For me chat with a paragraph in a language I sorta know (Japanese) or wish I knew (Chinese) is really useful. I ask for a translation and see discordances with what I can read and ask about them and get good answers. I also can lean on translations from my text and insist that certain words get used, etc.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#92

Post by TeaBrain »

easterncalculus wrote: post #79
KPGv2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Comparison is not metaphor. Ironically metaphor is actually something LLMs are somewhat adept at picking up on provided there's enough training data saying there's a metaphor there, for a seminal work.

Whatever you may wish to call it, simile or metaphor, it's a little silly to complain about it being referred to as a metaphor, considering that similes are a subset of metaphor, even if they often aren't taught this way to children. Also, in common speech and literature, what would be taught as similes to children are almost universally just referred to as metaphors.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#93

Post by bee_rider »

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."

I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers, and my list will quickly start to include folks who are more mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage that we literally use equations named after these guys!

Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#94

Post by jghn »

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…

I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers.

And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#95

Post by asimpletune »

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril.

On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. 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.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#96

Post by AlexandrB »

KPGv2 wrote: post #54
falcor84 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one absolutely agree that reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water

It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.

Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup

Re: What's happening to reading?

#97

Post by zapw »

allturtles wrote: post #82
zapw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, agreed completely. You can get a lot (but not everything) from context. The text will be clearer if you look up unfamiliar terms (which they were allowed to do). But if you gloss over Lincoln's Inn Hall as "obviously some kind of inn", you won't have a full understanding of what follows.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#98

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

easterncalculus wrote: post #87
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…

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 characte…

> Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now

This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#99

Post by mNovak »

floatingtorch wrote: post #8
thepryz wrote: post #7

I haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story available to listen to instead.

In the age of LLMs vacuuming up all content and deriving all the economic value from it, can you blame them?

Sites like the New Yorker have had pay walls since before LLMs entered the scene, and moreover they purposely make their content available freely to those web crawlers that are supposedly robbing them (hence why archive links work).

Re: What's happening to reading?

#100

Post by haiku2077 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #96
KPGv2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.

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

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