Your Brain on Books
publicbooks.org
publicbooks.org
Shannon took a youthful interest in cryptanalysis after reading a detective story and continued to reference detective stories in later years as he worked out his ideas about information. (In the early 1950s, for instance, he tested his intuitions about probability and communication with a noir story by Raymond Chandler, “Pickup on Noon Street.” He spelled out a sentence, letter by letter, to his wife and research assistant, Betty. After each letter, she guessed what the next would be. Eventually, demonstrating the predictability of communication if you have a large enough sample text, she was correctly guessing three letters at once. A S-M-A-L-L O-B-L-O-N-G R-E-A-D-I-N-G L-A-M-P O-N T-H-E D … E-S-K. Shannon figured that the letters we can predict aren’t information, because they don’t tell us anything new.)
If you mean that humans writes one word at a time, yes that is true. Humans generate words sequentially. But that isn't a very interesting comparison.
In fact chatGPT is able to generate a accurate and self aware response to that query that is fitting and within context:
Over the weekend, I was right here, ready to assist users like you with their queries and requests. As an AI, I don't have personal experiences or weekends in the traditional sense, but I'm always available to help with any questions or tasks you have! How can I assist you today?If I ask that to a human they will respond with different things from weekend to weekend, or depending on their mood or if they trust me enough to talk about it or if they did something sensitive that they want to hide. It isn't the same thing.
Because it is trained on data before it existed, it doesn't know anything about itself except answers they explicitly gave it as responses to those questions.
Do you believe that ChatGPT is self aware or something? I'm not sure how you could believe these things otherwise, ChatGPT is fed a lot of standard responses to questions to make it look more self aware, just like the "As a language model I can't ..." responses that stops it from answering certain questions.
Interesting, because spoken languages are linear, but signed languages are less so. You have multiple articulators working simultaneously, and concepts like buoys. I suspect that humans don't think sequentially.
[1]Shannon, Claude E. "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English." Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, 1951, pp. 50–64.
Edit: Thanks to ChatGPT I've managed to recall the paper
I've gone from always having a 'WIP' book in my late teens to reading 2-3 books a year nowadays. I don't read less though - just more of it comes from blogs. The feeling I get from non-fiction books is that, whatever actionables the book pitched, you can put them into practice after reading a few summaries.
This does not apply to fiction. Reading lengthy descriptions of scenes, keeping track of a lengthy plot+subplots, characters, etc seem like brain workouts.
My main gripe is this: most great ideas can be transmitted in less than 200 pages of text. Images help - a lot. Why do hold books on a pedestal?
PD: I've tried looking for (without any luck) an article where the author compares book maximalism nowadays to oral-tradition-ear folks who may have argued books couldn't quite convey the message as well as an oral story.
i am puzzled by this statement that 'most great ideas can be transmitted in less than 200 pages of text'. do you mean that the total of the world's great ideas add up to less than 200 pages? or do you mean that each individual idea takes less than 200 pages? enormously less, i'd think; i would argue that each great idea in knuth's taocp is about half a page, but there are several thousand of them, one right after the other, boom boom boom
i do not think you can put all the ideas in taocp into action after reading a few summaries, or indeed after reading the series from beginning to end without stopping. you have to do the exercises and think about things a lot. books are really good at pausing and rewinding, and they support annotation well
if you spend 100 hours reading blogs and 100 hours doing exercises from taocp (and reading the text preceding the exercises) you will find that your skills improve enormously more in the second 100 hours. this is because reading things doesn't improve your skills
then the question is, why do exercises from a book instead of from a blog or something? and the answer is that the required blogs don't seem to exist. the closest thing is something like khan academy, but they only cover super basic stuff. naturally, ebooks are perfectly fine for this, and a lot more portable, but paper books have larger screens than portable computers that weigh more
pictures are of course wonderful, and taocp in particular would be better with more of them. and for things like how to grout tile, how to dance contact improv, how a dobby loom works, or how people are being burned alive, books are grossly inadequate, and other media like video are much better
books are also nice for reference purposes but wikipedia is usually better for stuff that's slightly mainstream
there's a factor of how much effort is involved. a 256-page book might take you three hours to read, but only a person-year to write. a community of practice of, i don't know, 2000 user-interface researchers can write books (or blogs) about their area of user interface research or whatever faster than you can possibly read all of them. the only lazier medium is livestreaming, where three hours of some dipshit yelling at the camera produces three hours of content. a three-hour movie, by contrast, takes hundreds of person-years, so such movies only exist when someone can be persuaded to risk a fortune on their commercial prospects. 2000 makeup artists, puppeteers, actors, digital cgi artists, etc., can make maybe six such movies a year, most of which you'd still regret watching
it sort of sounds like you're not looking for what i would call 'ideas', which is to say, mental tools that make you more powerful. you are looking for a slick salesman type to 'pitch' you 'actionables', which is to say, to manipulate you into doing what they want with some kind of emotional rhetoric and a call to action. canonical examples include televangelists, carnival barkers, ted talks, and literally hitler. to me your desire seems pathological, like cutting yourself to get relief from mental anguish, because the actionables he will pitch you are for his benefit, not yours. you're seeking to be abused and exploited. i hope you get better and learn to slam the door in the faces of people who pitch you actionables instead of seeking them out
It’s about spending time in somebody else’s mind (non fiction) or in somebody’s world (fiction).
Analogously, meditation is about the act of being with yourself at the present. Yes you can learn some actionable things along the way but that is not the point.
Really interesting concept
Most content is crap and getting through it fast enough doesn’t really increase its value. The right content, otoh, is worth spending a lot of time immersed in.
Maybe my opinion on this is negative due to my Eastern European upbringing, but I would say it's because it's something often seen as painful (think of a thick book with a dense vocabulary, being more scary rather than appealing to the majority of people), and, people are OK with wasting time if it involves pain, it gives the impression of a more honest attempt to achieve something, and books are the go-to for the majority of people who judge whether somebody is being productive or not.
It has everything to do with the experience, and nothing to do with "being seen reading a thick book." I'm not on Instagram or Tik Tok with images of me reading. I'm reading because I want the experience and actually enjoy it.
Yeah, kiddo is allowed to read as much as desired, but video games are not allowed. (I'm a gamer, but my wife now hates the hobby with a passion. She was ambivalent until we had a child.)
Wasn't until I got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and started on meds, that I could actually focus well enough to read books uninterrupted - and that reading became very enjoyable.
You concentrate your attention upon the reading process. IE you concentrate on the sight of the words on the page, a little translation algorithm/habit in your mind, and the story evoked.
It's basically a kind of trance. Concentration narrows your perspective and makes you silent (unagitated that is). And in that silent, narrow space you perform little miracles like observing your thoughtstuff with great clarity and turning off the rest of the world.
I'm slightly addicted to LITRPG. There's some good stuff there. But that's more of a fill-in for hard scifi, my true crack. Always looking for the next Greg Egan.
this got a good chuckle out of me. what is it with hollywood and not being able to create products that people want to consume? and by extension cancelling projects that are in their final stages of development?
Most movies made today are still 1h30+ long, and I'm pretty sure all of those didn't come up with incredible stories that really warrant that length of time investment.
Movies could see a renaissance once we accept they can be any length, including 45min if that's all it takes to properly tell the story.
For books it's all the more obvious when we sometimes see a succesful blog post blowing up into a full blown book with no additional insight.
The issue is probably monetization and how to sell short content. I think it's hard, but also don't feel like throwing my time through the window as a result.
Similarly, ebook readers, particularly ones with subscriptions like Kindle Unlimited, are consuming more novellas, which is an awkward length for a full priced, physical book since the (near) death of paper magazines and pulps.
The interesting part to me is this seemingly paradoxical evolution of the contents getting shorter and more bit-sized, and us consuming more and more of it: if the "risk" associated is lower, people are more willing to give it a chance, and while we can spend 10h binging something, it only happens because we can stop at any moment and go do errands, answer a call, go to sleep when too tired etc. without too much disruption or missing out (at best we just need to rewatch the last 5 min of the previous episode to get back into the plot)
The other side of it being podcasts and audiobooks, who completely bypass the time commitment requirement by being parallel to everyday life.
All of this could happen with traditional media as well. We've all seen people standing in the middle of a movie and just get out, or skimming books, or just giving up after the first 2 chapters, but there was much more of a loss (in money and time) and it was socially thrown upon to a point I still have a hard time to understand.
> The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.
[Full disclosure: driveby quoteposting with no extra content or contextualization is one of my most deeply felt pet peeves]