Why do we obsess so much over legacy form factors?
Watching movies, listening to 2h conference talks, playing a 60h narrative videogame, and reading scientific papers in PDF may not be as noble, but they are equally meaningful to me.
Watching movies, listening to 2h conference talks, playing a 60h narrative videogame, and reading scientific papers in PDF may not be as noble, but they are equally meaningful to me.
No one is telling you to stop watching movies or playing video games, but being a more active participant in a leisure activity can be beneficial every once in a while.
1-3% of people have aphantasia. That’s not everyone, but it’s close.
Player driven games like that are actually making the best use the medium and it's special quality of interactivity. Film-games really want to be films and are trying to awkwardly cram elements of the medium of drama into the medium of games which is really gonna hurt the end result, even if they do stellar work, they are starting from a huge disadvantage by working against their chosen medium.
It does depend heavily on the game. There are games that involve a lot of farming where I think reading a book problem results in larger brain activity.
Puzzle games like the witness engage the brain much more.
The modern stuff feels like total fluff compared to a book, which in turn feel like total fluff compared to the academic papers it is based on. These days I would rather spend 2 hours reading a good book or paper than 10 minutes watching an engagement-optimized edutainment video.
And for the really good stuff you have to go even more legacy – conversation with an expert. A medium older even than books. That’s where you get the stuff that hasn’t made it into papers yet, let alone the downstream half-digested edutainment stuff.
For anyone who wants to get back into reading books my advice is to start with whatever sounds fun. A lot of people fall into a trap of feeling like they need to read something useful or serious and just get turned off to the idea. But reading lighter books are still great and provide a lot that you won't get from tv and similar mediums. Over time your interests will evolve naturally into new areas.
Yep, it appears that the deepest format we have today is long-form hypertext. Often containing a few 10min videos itself.
Some people do equate those with books, but it's far from unanimous.
Lots of surface level books that are the length of a book and the value of a 5min tiktok too.
Modern 8 to 10 episode series can get close to being as nuanced as a good book. You simply need space to go deep, no amount of cleverness will help you do that in a short format.
I'd love to hear of one that was though.
Mainstream gaming is still getting there, but to me titles like The Last of Us Part 2 are on par with classic HBO shows like Six Feet Under.
There is no music that compares to "War and peace" or paintings like "1984", nor is the movie "Alien" like any book. Describing H R Gigers monster design with words will not have the same artistic impact.
I think different creations can be be great artistic works on entirely incomparable axes.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is one great artistic work. If you haven't played it, you haven't experienced the peak of a massive wildly recognized medium. Last of Us (the show) was essentially copied verbatim from the video game, scene for scene.
On the entire opposite side of the complexity spectrum, both Limbo and Inside are great artistic works.
What makes LotR a "great artistic work"? What makes Stardew Valley not a "great artistic work"?
Just like some books, films, or other art can resonate and have a profound impact on a person, so can video games.
That's a great question. It's a mixture of technical skill and intellectual depth.
For example, throughout Scotland placenames are a mixture of old Gaelic, modern Gaelic and Norse, and then there are the Anglicised versions on top. So learning what placenames mean is something I did in school and it's a fascinating subject.
So when Gildor is talking with Frodo, and mentions the "...Branduin, that you call the Brandywine..." (quote from memory; might not be correct), that's exactly what happens with placenames. It's that level of depth (in all aspects, this is just an example) that makes it a great work. You can read more on just the name of a river at https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Baranduin
Enjoyment of art is, as you say, totally subjective, but anyone who's artistic can generally identify when something is a great work even if they don't personally like it.
Edit: if you like this kind of stuff, there are also some cool blog posts on the logistics of the Battle of Gonder: https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...
As literature goes it has tons of shortcomings.
Tell me I'm wrong.
Maybe generative AI will get to the point where a single author can create a comic, movie or game with similar depths as that of books but it hasn't yet.
Hardly it almost always a shortened more approachable summary of something described in a book. Also (IMHO) videos are a horrible format for transferring knowledge, it’s slow AF compared to reading and impossible to search, you have to consume it mostly sequentially
Sure, you could buy a book about snes (not even sure if any good ones exist) and read about that... but you're not that interested into the topic, because it's something old and not something you'll actually do... but here's a 6 minute video, that you'll probably watch... and if it's interesting, you'll go down a playlist and see "how thing were done" "back then" and learn something new.
Ever heard of Tefifon music player? Neither have I, until i saw the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqfVS6ahArs ... i would have never bought a book on ancient music players, but I learned something new by watching a short video.
Ever heard of purple gold? Neither have I, again, until the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI
Compare this to eg. book bestsellers: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/combined-print-an...
Sometimes all you need is a summary, you're not a chemist, SNES programmer or an old music player collector, but you still learn a lot, and all those things are topics, where you just don't buy a book, because th 10, 20 minute video covers all that you need and want to know.
Certainly. However a text summary is still much more efficient (unless you’re watching the video mainly for entertainment).
If you enjoy reading that's one thing but there's not much point otherwise.
Reading a summary of the book in Wikipedia/Blinkist/ChatGPT is definitely not the same as the reading book.
Sure, you may grasp at the central idea or argument superficially, but to understand it fully, with its caveats and nuances, and overarching context?
You can regurgitate but not assimilate.
You're putting way too much faith into people's intelligence (or projecting your own onto them) if you think people are picking up the nuanced bits just by reading.
Which still to the thread starts point. All of that stuff could be captured in a diff medium and to my point if it's worth capturing in the first place can be summarized and the additional stuff you're mentioning written as bullet points.
Of course no one - no matter how intelligent! - will pick up every bit of nuance. That's why engaging with what other people think (also a process!) about [whatever] is an important part of skill development. I don't think anyone is incapable of engaging in this - even if their sophistication will always be limited by their intelligence / affinity / time / etc etc etc.
This is a useful paradigm under which to consider other skills. Computer code (product) is (approaching...) wide availability from LLMs, but the skills necessary to be a good developer come through a process that involves independently solving problems and asking questions that have (at least at first!) already been addressed by others.
It may be old, but calling it "legacy" implied it's an old relic we should abandon.
I'll say that the opposite is the case. We should be reading more, and do less of passive activities such as watching movies or listening to conferences (where its very easy to zone out and not get any useful transfer).
Overall I think this readers to become more reasonable people, because life is full of unreasonable things. Things we can't explain, things that seem silly, but we nevertheless have to grapple with them.
Other fiction can fulfill a similar role, but I suspect that books are better at it because they require the reader to put in more effort.
Movies and games are fine if you're comparing to fiction and just relaxing.
As someone who does all the things, reading (even listening to audio books) feels different to me. I get more out of it.
There's too much that's either unsaid or can't be said in those other mediums. The mediums themselves even preclude any kind of depth due to their very nature, constraints, whether they be financial constraints, distribution, time-slot scarcity (as in a T.V. series), etc. Many seemingly educational works become vapid infotainment (TED Talks, History/Discovery networks, videogames can maybe be narrative, but the essence of it is always the gameplay).
I think his thesis was directed more at the importance of non-fiction expositions, but I feel it's just as applicable to works of fiction, which are oftentimes even better at expounding important ideas, philosophies, etc. than non-fiction works.
A few centuries ago, the illiteracy rate was way higher. But it’s always been mostly been niche activity for intelligent people, that’s why the school used to focus on training that skill
Isn’t it? Weren’t people reading more books on average if we go back a decade or few?
Based on recent HN threads, sounds like a large percentage of scientific papers are pure fiction. At least books on Goodreads have public reviews and a simple star rating.
Does similar exist for scientific papers?
https://retractionwatch.com is a good one to read occasionally.
We shouldn't. We also don't, not really. Reading books has a certain prestige, but by almost any measure, we "obsess" more about movies and/or tv shows. Even some of the best selling books of all time probably have orders of magnitude less exposure than tv shows, movies or games. Not unrelatedly, far more people talk about TV shows and games, etc.
I think the only obsession is that some people consider books to be "better" in some sense. Personally, I don't think books are better, just different. I enjoy TV shows and movies as much as I enjoy books, and consider them to both be important. (I don't play many games, which I think truly is me missing out!)
> reading scientific papers in PDF, listening to 2h conference talks
is not equivalent to
> Watching movies, playing a 60h narrative videogame
How many people are reading scientific papers but zero books?
I learned history in a way that sticks much better from Europa Universalis and Total War than from books, even though those games aren't even real in the sense that you're making up a new timeline. Orbital mechanics only clicked for me when trying to land a rover on the Mun in KSP.
Maybe entertaining simulations are the second-best way to learn besides actually doing something, with books somewhere further down the line.
https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-e...
But you do learn about the situation in which different countries and historical figures found themselves and the options they had.
This is much more valuable because this type of learning has lessons for today; versus merely memorizing that king such-and-such did this-and-that in 1523, which doesn't.