Scholars once feared that the book index would destroy reading | Hacker News Reader

Scholars once feared that the book index would destroy reading

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149 pointshhs52 comments

This reminds me of an episode of 99% Invisible [0] that I listened to. That episode also covered a bit about the history of indexes (which is relevant to the history of alphabetical sorting), including how scholars feared and resisted the adoption of indexes. It was super fascinating and I highly recommend giving it a listen if you found this article interesting!

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/

Thanks for that. Now I have 530 episodes in my podcast queue :)

On a side note, I've always wish there was an API that could recommend media content.

Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs, movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and spit out what you would probably find fascinating.

You've basically described recommendation engines generally and they tend to deliver mediocre to awful results for a bunch of different reasons. I remember hearing talks on the topic over a decade ago and things haven't really gotten much better--and my sense is that most people have given up on actually creating a good engine.

I’ve found much better results using your lists to find people with some overlap, and then looking at what they have.

Which is basically what HN is.

Do recommendation algorithms not take this into account already? Perhaps privacy policies make it harder to automate this effectively.

The famous ones may, but it ends up taking into account "what do we want you to see/listen/look at" much more into account.

The original Netflix prize also, it turned out, wasn't really implemented for a number of reasons. But one of them was apparently that Netflix doesn't necessarily want to give you the best recommendations; it wants you to keep your subscription. There's certainly some overlap between those objectives but they're not the same thing.

They're also incentivized to show you things that cost them "nothing" or "less" than others things - and if they KNOW the things you'd like to watch it's better for them to string those out so you keep subscribed.

The perfect Netflix customer is one always on the cusp of cancelling from lack of use but never actually does ...

In addition to the cost angle, they're also incentivized to push you towards exclusives. Things you can watch on other services (assuming you subscribe and know they're there) are much less of a hook to keep you on Netflix.

I have played ~5 seconds of one random episode from the front page on my Netflix profile since i subscribed around 2016. This was just to verify that it worked.

It still chuckles me up when they send me an e-mail once in a while, about what I might like based my past viewing preferences.

Note: My GF, has a profile that she uses sometimes, but mine haven't been used since the account was created.

It depends what the overlap is of course. Something like music probably has a big age component in what people like for example.

But, yes, in general friends with at least reasonably similar preferences to myself are almost certainly a better source of recommendations for video, music, and books than a recommendation engine.

I remember when Pandora was attempting to compute the "DNA" of a song (assorted classifications like key, tempo, style) and recommend music based on that. You could then get a "station" based on a single song, and fine-tune it by adding more or disliking songs as they came up.

The end result was underwhelming- it never really captured the characteristics that I actually liked about particular songs, and ended up being crappy or so narrowly tuned that it lacked enough variety to be interesting.

The concept is still around, but with less scientific sounding fluff and, I think, more relaxed parameters for recommendations.

Did Pandora change at some point?

The last time I used it, I don't recall seeing the "DNA" nonsense, or being able to get a list of characteristics that they used to build a station around... It's possible that the interface simply changed and I didn't look hard enough for it though.

It's still using the same type of algorithm

Pandora is based off of the "Music Genome Project" which was a massive effort that took tons of music efforts to make happen. Experts literally sat down and deconstructed individual songs by hand and gave them tags.

It's truly a historic achievement and it's almost sad how the massive effort mainly resulted in a private database that's primarily used for a failed Spotify competitor

I am 100% with you there. The things that could be done to advance the creation, understanding and appreciation of music from that work is staggering. It's sad that it's stuck in amber.

>You could then get a "station" based on a single song

Apple Genius did something similar and it mostly worked not badly because it was drawing from songs in your collection already.

You're more likely to like songs in specific genres and time periods and songs that are popular generally. Once you get beyond that, it gets harder. And the situation is probably even harder with video unless you basically watch superhero films.

I worked through whatever the length of the queue was in 2017 over the course of a summer and a long driving commute :)

It's a really, really great show. You won't regret it.

As soon as I saw this post I thought it that podcast. It was quite interesting how we take the alphabet as so fundamental. (And with a surname beginning with "V" I was always frustrated at school at being down the back of the line unless an enlightened teacher occasionally mixed it up)

There are still modern authors who buy into this kind of argument. E.g. the late John Taylor Gatto, who refused to use footnotes because he thought they made readers dumb. I forget whether or not his books have indices.

Sorry to hijack you but I can’t help my curiosity.

  Index: 1) a pointer 2) a structured collection of pointers
  Indices: two or more pointers
  Indexes: two or more structured collections of pointers

(Where “pointer” is used in a slightly generalized sense, like “reference”)

Yay or nay, pedants of HN?

"To index" means to point, as with your index finger. An index, such as at the end of a book, serves to point into the main body of the work. In this context, I think of an index like a mass noun; the whole thing serves the purpose of pointing, so one does not count the individual entries to quantify the whole. This is the same sense as in database indices, I think.

I don't really make a distinction between "indices" and "indexes"; it seems more a matter of how integrated "index" is into English, since "indices" would be (I believe) the Latin pluralization, while "indexes" uses the more typical English plural scheme. They index (ha) the same semantic meaning in my mind.

(We have the same issue with "appendix" and "appendixes" vs "appendices". It's telling that neither spelling bothers iOS as I type this.)

Then you have octopus with many plural forms: octopuses, octopi, octopodes (oct-oh-pohds, oct-o-po-dees), octopen, octopees, octopa, ...

Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising.

There is a book some folks mention written about alphabetical order. There was also a book written some years prior about the telephone book. Google has obliterated alphabetical business listings.

> Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising.

AAAAAASEO.com will be the first result for every search.

If the sorting is by domain name, I usually find 0 comes first. Something like 000000AAAAAASEO.com. There is now a .aaa gTLD. Perhaps they would cash in. Thus the first result might be 000000AAAAAASE0.aaa

Sorting by business name might make more sense. Naming a business tends to rely on trademark law, which IMO is a better system for resolving name disputes than the ICANN domain name system.

>... on the Continent Galileo grumbled at the armchair philosophers who, “in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire into their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them.”

That quote does not appear to be dismissive of indexes to me. It appears to be about people who appeal to authority rather than doing their own empirical research.

I didn't see other quotes to support the claim that [a significant number of] scholars feared that the index would destroy reading, and I'm a bit skeptical of the claim offhand. I wish there was some information structure that would allow me to find such supporting evidence more easily...

Further down that quote, the author talks about the issues John Marbeck and J. Horace Round had faced. Also note, this piece is a book excerpt.

I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages, was also harmful with arguments along similar lines.

In a modern context, PDF (pages) or websites (infinite scroll).

Personally I like scrolling, usually with a 2-finger gesture on a trackpad. For keyboard-only navigation (e.g. UNIX "less"), pages make sense though, controlled with the spacebar or Page Up/Page Down keys.

Scroll and pinch-to-zoom on a single trackpad is particularly user-friendly in my opinion, as well as two-finger tap to right click and search/define/copy-paste/etc.

I'll latch on the point being made about the capacity of long reading being eroded by tech. The author dismisses it as old-timey, but I think this is largely true[1]

>"The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015. Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014."

I think even behaviour like calling a 10 minute video "too long", is now common. It seems absurd to me to just describe this neutrally as the author does and call it an 'adaption' comparing it to us behaving differently than 11th century monks. Reading differently might be fine, but when anything longer than five minutes of sustained concentration is too much you're getting to a point where you physically can't actually engage with anything in long form any more.

[1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnys...

In 1982 on a Sunday afternoon, after the shops were all closed, and you’d already read yesterday’s paper, and last months Practical Computing your options for passive entertainment were limited to TV, radio and books.

I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.

I tried to read every single book in my village's library in early nineties. Only skipped later parts of series that I've already tried. We had 4 TV programs, no internet yet, no kids my age in the neighborhood, what was I supposed to do.

On the other hand, the longest works of written fictions in the world are fanfictions published on the internet.

These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil.

The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.

I strongly disagree and here’s why: your response doesn’t consider the means, which are much more important than some people still do read long-form works, and they do it on new-ish mediums like fanfic.

Yes, those traders still do exist. Same is true of the 40% of Americans that still read a book a year. But that number is falling quickly, and both my personal experience (older Gen Z) and scientific literature regarding the collapse of attention spans seems very real to me.

Scholars once feared that a search engine would destroy intelligent reasoning.

It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples biases. (both search engines and other content ranking systems).

That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me personally.

Oral historians also thought writing would make people lazy and doom humanity to ignorance. People just fear change.

My take away: People often think they know whats best for others and create needless roadblocks in their 'best interest'.

Or the roadblocks were created to address a narrow problem set, while ignoring the broader benefits of doing so. So everyone gets punished in the interests of a few who don't like to read.

> People just fear change.

That is a rather shallow dismissal of your opponents. Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that?

> Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that?

Their stated reasons were certainly nuanced and fairly well argued. They were also completely wrong, built on a stack of assumptions and biases. The whole thing was just a solid congealed lump of motivated reasoning driven by fear of change.

Plato and Socrates apparently feared literacy in common men, and bemoaned the decline of memorization and the tradition of oral instruction. After all, if you had a scroll, you could reread just the passage you wanted, divorced from it's context in a larger argument! Terrible!

The dangers of cheap books printed by the thousands on Gutenberg's invention were decried in tracts produced unironically on that selfsame malefic device.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, popular novels were the great danger, inflaming the passions of women, agitating men to be unhappy with their lot and make demands of their betters (or conversely encouraging idleness and escapism into fiction).

As far as I know, paperbacks as a format didn't get the same treatment, but cheap pulp magazines and comics certainly did.

And now the Internet is the Big Bad (not too long ago it was television, then transistor radios, D&D, and video games).

Algorithmic news feeds are currently causing problems, but that has more to do with the incentives of the businesses running them than anything inherent in the concept.

> Plato and Socrates apparently feared literacy in common men,

Can you back this up?

It's part of Phaedrus by Plato (one assumes that his portrayal of Socrates' opinions isn't misleading, since we really only know Socrates from Plato's writing):

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

People don't know how to use google search to find answers anyway.

And University libraries have had search engines since before the web existed and a part of scholarly learning was supposed to be understanding how to use them, so you could find whatever article you were looking for in the library.

I'd be happy if the kids today would get even better at using search engines.

The discussion would not be complete without mentioning that Socrates opposed writing entirely, and he provided good reasons.

http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2007/11/socrates-objectio...

The move to AI assisted coding will destroy programming.

There is, of course, a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1227/

Just goes to show that this sort of thing is not unique or new! Reading is something done mostly on the toilet or waiting for the bus. There’s no reason to think it only happens on a quiet sunday morning.

It did. You just don’t remember the sublime experience that once was.

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