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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to read books to be literate. You can read magazines, newspapers (paper or electronic), if you look on such statistics [1] then, well, numbers are different.

Here Poland is on the 3rd place in Europe in terms of time spent on reading - I think this includes not only books, not sure, as this article is a typical XXI century click-bait journalism that does not provide any substantial details about the subject.

Besides, the good question is, what is more valuable and mind opening: reading stupid book or watch a good documentary on TV or some scientific channel on YouTube. It is 2021, times has changed, we have more media of idea exchange.

Reading books is no longer such a good measure of ones "intellectual development".

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/chart-of-the-day-wher...

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I agree that you do not need to read books, but books are a good proxy for demanding content. If I count articles, the short texts from some gossip portal are valued as much as Harvard Business Review, science journal or whatever else, but their value is wildly different. Same goes for books by the way, but effort to finish a book is much higher.

I also do not believe reading time stats, as people are not that good on self reporting, especially without hard criteria.

The problem is that if you do not read demanding content, your ability to comprehend gets smaller. We made a society that you can live in without much intellectual struggle, but the question is whether we can keep having that society if we permanently cease to pursue intellectual interests.

>You don't need to read books to be literate. You can read magazines, newspapers (paper or electronic)

Where, even in the best, you'll find 1/10th the substance you'll find in the best of books, packaged in vacuous snippets for quick consumption, and written to gather advertising...

The person who wont read any of the classic books (be it science, non-fiction, literature, history, etc.) but will still read magazines and newspapers, I'll still call illiterate - even if the magazine was the Economist or the National Geographic, and not Men's Health and Cosmopolitan (which more often than not, is).

Surely being literate is simply being able to read and write coherently? Whether you read books, the Economist, academic papers, Hacker News, or whatever, I don't see how it matters.

Does it include "reading comprehension"? I understand being able to read and write, but understanding what you're reading should be part of it I think.

And I don't mean "deep thought" level critique and understanding. More like following a paragraph and understanding what is being said.

> Does it include "reading comprehension"?

"Literacy"? Not really. AFAIK, there's the "functional literacy" term for that.

What good is literaracy (alone) without reading comprehension?

Being able to read road signs and the like?

I'd say that there can be degrees of reading comprehension, and I tend to view functional illiteracy as literacy attrition, kind of secondary illiteracy. I guess it's useful to distinguish it from strict illiteracy (somebody not having learned how to read in the first place), as it requires a different kind of treatment, even if the symptoms of both are similar.

>Surely being literate is simply being able to read and write coherently?

In an idiocracy, it doesn't.

Literacy meant more than simple being able to read and write on a technical level. (Not that most people not reading "even a book a year" can read and write coherently or "read the Economist" otherwise).

While I believe I'm sympathetic to you, I think the hang up people have is in your use of the word "literacy." I think most people wouldn't call people who can read a news article illiterate.

I do agree it would be better if people read more actual books but this seems like a degree of literacy issue while illiterate tends to mean "completely unable to read."

It's usually called 'functional illiteracy'.

If you can read the words in an article, but don't understand what it says, should you really be considered literate?

Understanding what it says is not understanding the meanings of separate words, but the meaning of the text in question.

Sure but even that's a bit of a distance from what they're arguing. I can imagine that someone can totally not read a book every year but still understand context of say a news article they've read. That is nowhere near functional illiteracy.

Where, even in the best, you'll find 1/10th the substance you'll find in the best of books

That's assuming people read the best books.

Let's not forget that Fifty Shades of Grey was the best selling book of the decade (in the US):

https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/20...

>That's assuming people read the best books.

Not doing that would still make them illiterate in some degree.

But even with mediocre books, at least they wouldn't be reading the attention-killing dopamine chasing snippets of BS on most online websites.

Do it sound like these "don't read even a book per year" people read The Well or LessWrong or something of the sort online?

You don't have to read books at all, and many people who do score poorly on literacy tests.

It's not your ability to read words that is relevant, but your ability to understand contexts and meanings.

> Do it sound like these "don't read even a book per year" people read The Well or LessWrong or something of the sort online?

Your reading preferences are not the gold standard in what makes a good book or makes one "literate". The same applies to every other single individual.

At the same time the internet obviously doesn't only contain "dopamine chasing snippets of BS". Online discussions and articles can improve critical thinking or make someone think deeper about their views and motivation just like literature can. Yet you deny that by bluntly saying all people reading no books are illiterate.

As a side note, before you start gatekeeping literacy you may want to avoid grammar mistakes in your own writing. Though it will not make your point come across less elitist, unfortunately.

>Your reading preferences are not the gold standard in what makes a good book or makes one "literate"

Yes, but those were just examples, not meant to pinpoint the golden standard but to illustrate the point.

>The same applies to every other single individual.

Yes, but it shouldn't apply to a collective cultural consensus.

Of course in this era nothing can be said to be of a higher standard, and everything cultural is subjective, lest one offends the high priests of mass culture and their "individual (consumer) is king" religion. So feel free to downvote, like other cultures and eras would have felt free to upvote.

>As a side note, before you start gatekeeping literacy you may want to avoid grammar mistakes in your own writing.

Ah, the ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the substance of the argument.

Never mind that I'm not a native speaker, and I would like to see how you would have fared in my language :-)

> Ah, the ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the substance of the argument.

If you judge others based on what they read you better meet your own standards, that's all I'm saying.

> Never mind that I'm not a native speaker

Me neither. Even though according to your statements in previous comments I'm illiterate.

>If you judge others based on what they read you better meet your own standards, that's all I'm saying.

I don't judge any particular person, much less one I'm involved in argument with, for that to be an ad-hominen.

I also don't abstracty judge people in general/in toto (e.g. morally, or in some such capacity) I judge their literacy/culture etc.

For this purpose, "what you read" has historically been even better than a mere correlation / proxy (being "well read" having been an essential attribute of culture).

blogs of strong people, forums tend to be good too

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