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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

It's important for people to remember that humans are still intelligent creatures that are capable of recognizing, eventually, what's good for them and what isn't. How many of you guys remember the 70s and 80s, when TV and video games were supposed to turn us all into zombies? What happened? We eventually learned how to see these things as the tools that they are. Humans get fascinated by the new and shiny. This fascination may become unhealthy and provide grist for scam artists. Then they wise up. It's the way of the world.

I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.

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> I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.

They most certainly did have. This reminds me about Socrates' take on books:

"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

Source: http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.h...

I, for one, find that quite hard to argue with. I guess that makes me tiresome company.

critical review is important, you shouldnt feel cowed against a rational argument, if we all agreed with each other then the first idea that occured would be accompanied by mutual consensus then we would snap to a halt and go nowhere with no variation or innovation

"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal — that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."

Source: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...

Reading is a balance - not reading in childhood is missing out. Reading too much as an adult is running away from life, much like TV and video games. On the other hand, I am reading the Three Body Problem now, and I am learning some history and being forced to remember scientific principles I didn't review since high school. So I guess the lesson is quality and not doing too much of it. I stopped reading sci-fi that didn't win the Nebula (or whatever it's called) award. Just not worth the time.

Kids today miss out if they're not online (which largely takes place on phones) and on social media. They miss out in social interaction, which is arguably even more vital to their development than reading books. Even when I was younger, so many interactions outside of school took place on AIM-- whole friendships and relationships were built off of these online interactions.

Nowadays kids have to be on top of the latest viral trends and YouTube videos and Twitch streams in order to keep up with what their friends are talking about. Like it or not, the digital world is pretty much essential for kids these days.

They miss out the dogma way of life. What an opportunity. Yes, they will cry if you don't offer them the last Supreme apparel. The latest American-made-in-china smartphone. But you're not forced to educate your kids like most american does. In France we have a word for that "enfant roi" (king kid). Books offer you tools to think. TV, latest trends and twitch give you tools to boost your never-ending growth ego, self-esteem, self-approval, instant flood of dopamine gratification, and all this bullshit american psycho concepts.

And then we have this counter-quote from another great mind:

"I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book" - Albert Einstein

Yes and these days it's mostly s/book/wikipedia/

You could probably make a better case for social media being much worse for your own mental health than video games. Everything's about instant gratification, creating and maintaining persona for the outside world to see and then hoping for approval thereof from your peers.

The video game world is disconnected from reality, involves long story lines, planning, strategy, skills that you can learn.

Maybe I'm wrong. If I had to chose, I hope my kid gets really in to video games instead of social media.

> The video game world is disconnected from reality, involves long story lines, planning, strategy, skills that you can learn.

Maybe your video game world. The vast majority of games sold out there, across the years, were games like PacMan, Super Mario, FPS shooters and flash games similar to Candy Crush.

My kids are really into a couple online games.

The games are geared towards mixed levels of instant gratification and longer gratification, creating and maintaining an online character/persona, getting approval from peers as you climb the hierarchy of loot (character skins, rare items, etc.)

We limit their time and they are in other activities like sports which take time to develop skills.

Just be careful because some video games hire psychologists to help engineer a game to hit those neural pathways at the right intervals to get players to keep wanting to come back.

Getting really into video games can involve helping build a PC or maybe letting them create their own games.

>> Everything's about instant gratification, creating and maintaining persona for the outside world to see

There are quite some of video games, where exactly this is the encouraged behaviour. Just think about the controversy over loot boxes or mmorpgs.

>remember the 70s and 80s, when TV and video games were supposed to turn us all into zombies? What happened? We eventually learned

Did we? A third of teens haven't read a book in the last year. And we "binge" on TV shows now which didn't really exist in the 70s.

> And we "binge" on TV shows now which didn't really exist in the 70s.

Isn't that an improvement overall? You decide you want to watch something and you watch until it's finished. Media consumption habits in the TV era were much more passive and a lot of people would watch a show just because it was on. "There's nothing good on TV" used to be a common lamentation, I wouldn't be surprised if this generation is better at switching off entirely if there isn't content they want.

> A third of teens haven't read a book in the last year

I doubt it makes up the short fall, but does anyone know how well the audio book industry is doing since sites like Audible cropped up? I haven't read a book in some time now but I've listened to several because they have several advantages over reading and the only disadvantage I can think of would by for someone trying to improve their reading ability.

Reading ability must be the goal with the criticism though? If it's just listening to a story you might as well watch it, or play it.

Many people listen to audiobooks in situations where they can't watch or play things, like driving or working out.

Exactly. I've gone through 12 audio books this year while I drive to and from work. I can't say I retain as much as I would if I had read them, but I also wouldn't have read any of them due to time constraints.

There's a lot more to take away from books than just reading ability and story. You have to imagine/visualise the world the author is painting so it's a creative effort. You're inside the characters, hearing their experiences, thoughts and motivations which teaches empathy. The latter especially is typically missing from other mediums or done in a much more shallow way through flashbacks or exposition and is usually the reason "the book was better than the movie".

All that does come across in audio books though, you just miss the actual reading and imagining the voices.

I like reading books, but there's nothing inherently good about getting knowledge through books.

Especially a lot of the "entrepreneur" or "productivity" books, where you have 80% padding because nobody wants to buy a 40 page book.

I'm in the early stages of writing a book now. Looking at my notes I'm thinking this will be a short but information dense book. At first it demotivated me slightly but then I realised I'm mostly writing the book as a reference for myself so now I'm actively trying to further condense. Thinking back most of the good business books I've read have been exceptionally short and to the point.

> there's nothing inherently good about getting knowledge through books

Strongly disagree. Reading a book requires patience and comfort with delayed gratification. Not only does it require it; I think it also develops it.

I don't think of a book as delayed gratification because books don't take that long. Consider, you click on a link and get a video your first thought is "do I have time for this?"

Watching a MOOK's is a huge commitment where reading a book covering the same material is fast. Video brings great value and can be more relaxing, but reading is generally just faster.

Which is why Audiobooks are popular & the most used feature is 2X playback on Audible.*

*No stats on this. They really don't have any features in their apps, so pretty confident here.

I’m 40 and I can count the actual books I’ve read in the last five years on two hands probably. I read voraciously, but I just don’t read books.

To be fair, I think 'binging' on TV shows started the minute videos became a thing. It wasn't as instant as it is now, but people were marathoning TV box sets from the very first time they were introduced.

And it wasn't exactly exclusive to that either. Oh sure, TV often had a mix of shows which stopped you watching the same thing all day long, but:

1. There were still many, many people who watched TV nearly non stop, as their main form of entertainment every day.

2. Many TV shows ran marathons of a particular series for hours/days/weeks at various points of years.

I agree. It seems we are just constantly moving from one moral panic to the next. It doesn't mean that there are no valid concerns, just that we need to stop and realize that overdramatizing everything isn't actually solving any problems.

I would argue its just another problem caused by our inability as a nation to rise above a childish level of discussion on just about any subject.

News media dramatize situations for views. There is, in life and in business, always a current problem(s) of one sort or another... it's when existential emergencies are vigilantly remediated and replaced by trivial "first-world" annoyances that life or business is good.

Books, of course have been thought of as subversive in earlier times. Even not that long ago. Book burnings, calls to ban particular books, all have occurred in living memory. Literacy itself has been seen as a threat.

Were not detractors of books usually unlearned people; people who didn't base their opinions on studies of the effects, but rather based on their feels? On the other hand studies can be flawed and can be purposefully biased, so we have to watch for that. But if we have credible studies indicating harm from all the ways content producers and other want to retain eyeballs, then that's different, I think.

Usually, perhaps, but learned people had their objections to reading & writing as well.

This one’s pretty well known, although couched in a few layers of rhetoric that mean it’s usually presented without context (and misattributed to Socrates). In Phaedrus, written by Plato around 370 BC, the character of Socrates tells how when the Egyptian god Theuth gave the gift of writing to King Thamus, Thamus replied:

“…this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Dude did have a point. Moving a large part of our memories outside of our skulls did change things quite a bit, just as leveraging the indexing and retrieval capabilities of computers (and systems of computers) has done more recently. We remember different things, and the way in which we remember those things is also different.

It's not that we've lost the abilities of our ancestors; it's more that we've gotten out of the habit of using them. How many hundreds of songs do you have stored in your head? Imagine living in a world where your "textbooks" and "user manuals" are written to have similar rhyme, alliteration and rhythm, and are only passed orally. People did live in that world (many still do), and when that world ends, and none of the kids today can recite, for instance, Inside Macintosh - they have to use some sort of grimoire or codex instead - it's easy to see that as a loss. It's harder to see it as a lever.

remember the 70s and 80s, when TV and video games were supposed to turn us all into zombies? What happened? We eventually learned.

So they turned TV to Netflix.

Yes, there have been a lot of concern about novels spoiling girls.

Not only girls. They were thought as "unmanly" for a while. Men were supposed to read technical and historical books, not "girly" novels. There's even a quip from Napoleon about it.

[re:] louis l'amour... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_L%27Amour

I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~~ Albert Einstein

Children watching too much television was a hot topic at the time. I remember reading about a "psychic" working for the government who made predictions for 2015. Curiously grounded in his contemporary time, he predicted a backlash against overuse of television.

It's the dose, not the substance that makes a poison.

There's an XKCD for Everything:

https://xkcd.com/1227/

Which has all been said before, what really interests me is what can be done to break this cycle for myself, to keep looking at new things as good and beneficial.

ahh...the gutengurg printig press... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg

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