What's happening to reading?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.
Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.
Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge
"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.
How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.
I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.
The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.
Of course, there's also commenters posting uninformed bullshit on the submission topic without actually reading the submission. But, again from experience, those comments have tell-tale smells, which you learn to recognize.
I have this experience too, until I remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. There are certain forums where there appear to be loads of high value takes, people discussing with confidence and conviction. And then you run into those same types of comments on a topic you’re actually a relative expert in, and they prove to be quite low value perspectives, but said with the same confidence and conviction. That tends to temper my feelings that any low-effort medium can be generalized as high-value.
- Comments are conversations -- in a quality community, low-value perspectives will get taken apart, and you can kind of get a feel from the conversation itself whether or not any of the participants actually know what they're talking about;
- Communities transcend individual discussions -- hang out in a community long enough, and you start to recognize other participants; over time, you'll learn who's an expert in what, and then those people become your reference points.
Say, e.g., I look at a subthread where some X, Y and Z talk deeply about cybersecurity, above my level of comfort. Normally I wouldn't be able to tell who, if anyone, is right, but over the years I've seen many comments of Y and learned that they're an actual domain expert on cybersec - so now the way Y responds to X and Z, and how the two react to Y's comments, give me a way to indirectly determine whether X and Z know what they're talking about.
And so on. Lots of natural, fuzzy human reputation tracking stuff - but that works in communities (like HN), not in one-off interactions (like a random article submitted to HN).
A rush to “get to the point” when dealing with art feels very much like the tech-obsessed productivity porn that can miss the forest for the trees.
Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.
Alan Watts
That said, I do also think you can apply it to the enjoyment of prose in that you don't need to read it, tapping your fingers, waiting for some climax and then a minor denouement, expressing frustration if "the point" seems to be taking to long to get to. Certainly there is a lot of bad writing that can be overly verbose/messy/in need of editing/etc. and, depending on the nature of the writing, attempting to write "artful" prose can be a misstep. But, often, I find that you can find great pieces of prose in an essay/article/novel/etc. that are well-composed, sometimes profound, and a general joy to read. Though, judging by many of the comments in this thread, many don't care to read that way.
A passage from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" springs immediately to mind.
"... 'Beware of first-hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'
Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men ..."
Or perhaps what Terry Pratchett wrote about the river Ankh may apply: "Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed." One has to wonder if people are thinking "Any idea that has passed through so many layers of minds has to be thoroughly refined indeed."
It’s like trying to explain what one may see hear or feel when their on vacation at an exotic new location by talking about the train tracks that brought you there.
So when you’re reading you’re not downloading packets that add up to some kind of point. Instead, in the absolute best case scenario, you’re simulating the experience, according to the author’s recommended doses, of someone else “acquiring” knowledge. This “someone else” is the nameless reader the book was written for but they are not you.
I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.
Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.
When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.
"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:
https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.
Some of these articles are definitely more about the author being able to say they write than it is shedding light on anything or providing any kind of insight. It's all just gross to me
It's an art form, and it's about exploring the people behind the ideas as well as the ideas themselves.
I used to love reading the Saturday and Sunday magazines that came with the paper, this was back in the 1990s. Many of those were always of this long form, rambling, structure.
If you can see the pattern it's obvious once you start reading.
There's a sort of teaser at the beginning. Then they dive into a person's history like this:
Super Bionics is an exciting new form of prosthetic that's revolutionising lives.
Steve Jones was sitting on his porch when he first thought of super-bionics. Steve had always been fascinated by robotics when he was growing up. At 3 years old.........
5 paragraphs later they'll finally do a bit more about the super-bionics.
Then each section gradually moves the story forward in exactly the same way. They intro the subject. They introduce a new person behind the subject and explore them and their motivations. Then they say a bit more about the actual subject.
You're mistaking a writing style with time wasting.
I don't have the patience for it any more, but lots of people do.
- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.
- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.
- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.
Before most people could read, you would learn a trade from your father or as an apprentice. Knowledge was handed down but you pretty much learned "the way it has always been done" and improvements were slow.
Once we all could learn from books and publish our discoveries, the spread of knowledge and the pace of advancement exploded. We went from farming with animal labor to walking on the moon in under a century.
IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two problems:
1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case. The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but the brain in the student is making its own connections and tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way, leading to learning a different lesson from the one being taught.
2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present in their students.
So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right word for it.
Rhyming ending.
There are different ways of summarizing a text. Odyssey (another poem) could be summarized bluntly:
Homer's The Odyssey follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his perilous journey home after the Trojan War. For ten years, he faces trials, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch Circe, and the deadly Sirens, while angering the sea god Poseidon. Meanwhile, in Ithaca, his wife Penelope fends off persistent suitors, awaiting his return. With the help of the goddess Athena, Odysseus finally returns, disguised as a beggar. He reveals himself, defeats the suitors in a contest of skill and battle, and reunites with Penelope.
Or it can be summarized as I summarized Roses Are Red:
The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, is a richly layered epic that follows Odysseus’ tumultuous journey home after the Trojan War. It explores themes of heroism, identity, loyalty, and human frailty through encounters with gods, monsters, and mortals. The narrative intertwines adventure with moments of introspection, revealing a tension between fate and agency. Penelope’s endurance, Telemachus’ coming-of-age, and Odysseus’ cunning invite reflection on resilience and transformation. Yet, its moral ambiguities—violence, deception, and divine caprice—resist tidy resolution. The epic’s power lies in its openness to interpretation, offering a timeless meditation on the complexities of human experience and the longing for home.
Obviously very different approaches.
Even with a perfect summary, the source is still going to give something more. Nobody is arguing against that.
While the former one is quick plot review.
This seems extremely detached from reality. Just to give you an anecdotal example, I used to love reading books as a kid, but you'd be extremely hard pressed to find me reading one now. Clearly my reading habits have changed, and so it cannot be some intrinsic property written in my fate (which seems to be assumed to exist in the quoted framing).
Conversely, book purchases wouldn't fall or rise, especially over long timeframes, if there weren't changes in reading habits. It just doesn't make sense to portray people as these immovable objects, whose desire to read has been inscribed into them at birth.
> Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward.
When reading novels for pleasure is not among your hobbies, it most likely will be. You bet I don't often want to read e.g. documentation: I just want to get my hands on the magic incantations or magic phrases / values required, and move on with my day.
But this is true even for literature class, with its mandatory readings. I was one of the more naive folks in my class, so I'd make an earnest attempt at reading through those things. At the end, that only mattered to the extent that I can now tell you it was a complete chore. And the "reward" at the end of those was good test scores of course - something others could replicate by just relying on, then manually written, summaries.
> one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.
It is at most only an opinion that there is no understanding there, and so is that the impression the person would have about their understanding is false. Understanding is not a binary property, despite what e.g. the anti-AI crowd would make one believe, and you're no mind reader. I think that's pretty agreeable at least.
I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was going to type something into an LLM, they could have typed it into a search bar. People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read! They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!
I was correct. Now we have a costly LLM implementation and have our time wasted with questions that are already answered.
None of the KB systems I've ever encountered, from orgs big and small, reputable or otherwise, had in them any useful information whatsoever. It's all just bullshit, roundabout sales, and a lot of answers to questions no actual human being would ever ask.
Whether or not to put LLM in the KB's search bar is immaterial. Myself, when I see a KA syste, I immediately close the tab and "bounce" back to the search engine.
> People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read!
Yes, but also because they don't trust you to provide enough information to diagnose and solve their problem. There's no point wasting the time when experience tells you most customer-facing KBs are nothing but false hope and misleading headlines.
> They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!*
Yes, but not because they hate that random support person - it's because it's the only remotely reliable way to solve the problem itself. Companies shouldn't complain, not after standardizing knowledgebases and phone menus, which are all implicitly and often explicitly designed to keep customers away from support staff - and instead of providing a solution, they're optimized to make the user think the solution exists somewhere and they're just too dumb to find it (therefore, user's own fault, not company's fault; customer's brand perception unaffected).
As for making it the support person's problem - that's literally their job. That's what they're paid for.
These 25 screens of text are not for you, they are for Google.
i still like reading the adapted books into chapters from the walrus too. i havent been a subscriber in a while, but they tend to be nice reads that dont require me to commit to reading the same thing for the next couple weeks on the toilet
It's bad for the individual, but even worse for the collective. The AI summary reader isn't just convinced they understand, they also share that incorrect understanding in discussion. They effectively inject LLM slop into real life conversations and forget the subjectivity of reading.
This leads to what I consider more harmful. Discussions where the particiants themselves don't even believe in the stuff they are arguing. Where human beings, devoid of their own subjectivity, sling summaries and empty "facts" at each other. As if what 1984 textually said is important in any way beyond how you and I, the humans, connected with it.
I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace. I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.
I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.
I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.
Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person. They don't just see written words and know what they say. They really have to work to get meaning out of written text.
With the proliferation of other means of taking in information, many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They didn't want to do it before. And now they don't need to do it either.
Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
> I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
There is reading and then there is reading an unknown text out loud in public while being judged. The two are not the same thing. I had to read publicly when I was a student years ago when smartphones were a new thing. They handed me the text with instructions to reread it at least twice ideally out loud before performing.
The point is, it is not like 20 years ago a good student would be expected to read super fluidly out loud in public without at least a little preparation.
That stranger might conclude I can't read, when in reality I devour books, am the beta reader for my two published-author friends, and probably edit the "thoughts on books I've read" section of my personal wiki more than any other.
The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.
I knew "most" American adults couldn't. I didn't realize it was 87%.
> But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you.
I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.
It is incredibly telling that it strikes you as "always kind of insane."
Of course.
I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech.
What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.
Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth.
With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.
Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.
We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently.
For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.
Even "caught off guard", not "feeling particularly positive", and "reading phrasing from someone else", some people have so fundamentally mastered reading as a skill that this wouldn't be difficult for them even if the challenge were attempted drunk. The point of the parent comment was, I believe, that for such people it may be hard to imagine that others would believe "reading a wall of text is indeed hard" because it isn't for them.
To me, GP's point is that people aren't capable of reading. They illustrate this point with an experiment. I'm convinced the experiment doesn't prove their point and that's what I have spent time on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549089#44586441 makes a good point, although I'm not convinced that was the intent of GP.
They did when I was at school. But it was not so often, not often enough to get good at it if you weren't already.
And I don't think I'm good at it. Every so often, I find myself reading Wikipedia excerpts out loud for people around when some question comes up and we want an answer. When I do this, suddenly it feels like time slows down, I feel like I sound dull, and everything. I guess I could improve if I were to do it more frequently.
I think I do read relatively slowly, but doing it out loud doesn't help, and that also doesn't prevent me from reading a page of text for myself if it's worth it. I would not engage in unbounded out loud reading.
So reading out loud is just a bad test of reading ability.
Reading is a skill, and it's not the same as being (technically) literate. For someone who's a competent reader, there's nothing at all more intimidating about being asked to read a page from a book (you can choose the book, but a page from a book is not a "wall of text," and the book's publication also implies at least some pre-screening for accessibility) than being asked to have an impromptu conversation about where to find the potatoes, and whether you know any tasty recipes for them.
Most people don't read well. They read well enough to understand street signs before they pass them, or to get through an article intentionally written to a 6th grade level. But anything where the details are important? Or that requires explanation? They either cannot do it, or find it so difficult that they won't.
You'll have to prove that this impromptu reading out loud experiment indeed tests the agility to parse a text.
I believe you won't succeed because I think it's wrong.
I also believe this potato and recipe conversation in a supermarket won't unsettle many people, including people who can't cook.
As an experiment I spoke your comment aloud as I read it. It sounded natural and I made no mistakes at all.
> I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.
They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones radar that they'll actually pay attention?
Work only, I get 300+ per day. They're all valid and most of them go unread, especially the long ones. I also am in meetings most of the day, so email is not my highest priority. I scan and respond where essential, or often CC someone that I can delegate an action/decision to. Like I said, if things get urgent and I've not responded - people can find me other ways.
If email was as much as a priority to me as you want it to be, you're right, I probably wouldn't have time to respond here. I also wouldn't have time to use the restroom or sleep.
To flip the script, why are you composing full page emails? How much time does that take? Are you allergic to the phone? Do you want an answer? Do you want it timely? So on... as the sender in async communication, it's poor taste to jam wall of text infront of someone and have any expectation of when it will be read or acted on (same as the guy in the grocery store mentioned in this thread). The only exception is perhaps if it's from a superior and your job is to prioritize their communications - which of course I do, do that when I scan my inbox. There are people I always read and respond to, the vast majority of people sending me emails are not in that list.
If you insist on hammering it out in a meeting, somebody still needs to record the details or you can renege on whichever parts didn't suit you later. And if you wait until it gets more and more terse, you can come back later and accuse the other person of not having given you enough detail.
Email is an excellent tool for the job when details matter.
I don't know that what you've described is any different now than 20 years ago when I was in high school. People struggled to read aloud texts like plays or classic literature. I would use that as a bar for complex prose that benefits from good narration; often the point was to encounter unfamiliar words or meter and to read with the purpose of critical analysis. A friend of mine is an author and we did a group reading of a play they'd written. Quite hard to do off the bat. Similarly if you've ever tried to DM a role-playing game like DnD, where the text you read is semi-randomly chosen based on what the characters decided to do (also, will you role-play dialog?).
I've worked in academia for 10+ years at this point. You can tell almost immediately if a presenter has had practice, knows their material or is comfortable speaking in public. Lecturers and professors are, unsurprisingly, often very comfortable giving presentations and there are people who live for conferences and working groups. We're required to read dense material frequently. Understanding of a piece of work, or the attention span required to ingest a scientific paper, does not necessarily mean you could read it aloud fluently.
It's obvious if you think about learning a foreign language. Parsing written text silently is a completely different task than producing speech with the right intonations, even if you recognize the words.
Reading aloud fluidly requires a certain speed and anticipation. You have to be reading the next word in your head while you are still pronouncing the previous one. This isn't necessarily correlated with reading comprehension which is purely input.
How is that relevant ? Reading out loud is not the same as reading ? I struggle to keep pace with reading out loud - because I am just not used to it. I do better now that I read to my kids, but I don't think I have reading problems - reading out loud is a skill that's on top of reading. Speech patterns, words you're used to pronouncing, etc. all make reading out loud more difficult than speaking or just reading IMO
With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding. When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my learning and has me reading much more these days.
Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations, especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment of a subject.
The authority received the large body of text but, due to time commitments and attention, they didn’t have time to read it all. They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.
Not the point they wanted to make, but a point nonetheless.
Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.
I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.
Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even if windows still allows searching within files (it probably does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.
I traced down this through an academic article which favourably compared it to other summarising solutions back in 2006. It might help answer the question: https://web.archive.org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copern...
Ironically straight after reading this was an inline video advertisement, and this page crashes constantly (2.6 GB memory usage for an article?)
Most people don't read many books as it is. That's sad, but it's true for a couple decades. Those people will continue not reading.
Of the remainder, some people will continue to read books because reading books is enjoyable. It's not a chore, it's fun, so there is no reason to try to automate it away.
Another portion of people who read books only read them to get through them. Usually that's either because they want to understand some idea in them, or sometimes just so they can say they've read the book. These are the people who will use AI to summarize books rather than reading them line-by-line. I have zero problems with that, personally. That's not existentially troubling to me at all.
Nah, not too worried. Not about this anyway.
The thing that worries me about the future of literature is customization. I think having a shared monoculture—even a canon—is a good thing that we should strive for. We need it, to be part of the same community. The day that AI can easily just spin out a book that's exactly what you ask for, there won't be any reason for any two people to read the same books, let alone the same twenty million people. That will just accelerate the cultural fragmentation and attended alienation our culture has been living through for a while.
The same is true of books, only moreso, since I only know a few other people who regularly read for pleasure, and with whom I might share a reading experience.
So it may be hyperbolic to say that no two people will be reading the same books, I think it's directionally true that we'll continue getting more and more narrowcasted, personalized content over time, thanks to AI, and devoting a larger portion of our time watching it, compared to content aimed at a wider audience.
Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
I have negative interest in what LLMs write.
https://amontalenti.com/2024/01/31/media-diet
Written in Jan 2024. I sensed that the world had already moved on from reading as a core source of information and awareness of the world.
But in that essay, I tried to make the case that this is a mistake -- that the environment has never been better for deep readers, that the internet and the various sources of cheap/free long-form text can be a deep reading utopia, if properly curated.
But that's the issue. Most people click into the default. They don't curate. They don't monitor their media diet. And so they are drawn, like moths to a flame, to short-form video (especially), as well as other passive information sources that resemble TV and talk radio from prior eras.
Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's being replaced by video content as primary source of entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much) reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not exceeding that.
And it's not like they're stupid or anything, just have no desire to read, never learned to associate reading with something pleasurable.
But ... it shows. Like a friend has a kid who took the national exam that marks the end of secondary school (gymnasium) this year. He told me one question that was asked. Basically a conversation between John and George, John asking "George, will you start working or continue wasting your time doing nothing?", and George replies: "Right now I'm going to get the scissors to cut some leaves for the dogs". Question was, "What will George do? a) Start working or b) Continue wasting his time".
Kid chose "a) Start working" because as he argued, he goes after scissors and uses them to cut leaves, which is work. Asked my kid the same question, got the same answer: he'll start working. Well, but if they would have read a few books, they would have encountered the Romanian expression "cutting leaves to the dogs" as an idiom for laziness, lack of work, doing nothing. So they don't read anymore and it shows.
But if a kid asks you something using their language, you won't understand either. And given ABC test you would select wrong answer as well, despite reading 1000 books a year.
So it's not that simple. Times have changed, yes. Like they always do. My father's grandparents probably knew things and did things my father doesn't know (/ how to do). The grandparents could say: "Times have changed" as well.
So that is pointless although funny anecdote (IMHO ;) ). I don't know this romanian expression but "leaves for dogs" made thinking when I read that.
Also, take a note that reading itself is relatively new skill when we are talking about average person (75 years? Maybe, depending on the region). So if I were to engage into this topic I would not focus on books per se, but a communication (/ knowledge transfer) as a whole. I guess that would however get me (us) to entirely different conclusions, because stereotypically reading books is associated with something smart even if one reads harlequins exclusively.
The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.
One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.
“Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”
Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.
Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP
“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy.
[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
Dickens had a lot of issues with the legal system at the time and it was a protest work.
Toward the end of the story the fighting does stop when lawyer's fees, which they had been charging to the estate, at last empty it. This is announced publicly in court, and the attorneys respond by flinging their piles of paper into the air, one of a few comic scenes in the novel.
FYA, this modus vivendi is still being practiced -- see the litigation around the estate of O.J. Simpson.
I suspect that the unfamiliarity with words like Michaelmas was part of the point.
I.e. What do the students do when reading a book and they come across a word they don't know? Look it up? Deduce it's rough meaning from context? Live with the uncertainty? Get mad and not finish the text?
In my defence, I'm not a native speaker
Like how I text. To my wife. Whenever we're on our computers in different locations. No need to edit. She gets it. So do you.
A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that could actually sit through a whole reading session in her 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary necessary to parse this piece of text.
In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college. Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed the reality, but I'm not moving them.
>Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
>Facilitator: >O.K.
>Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere.
What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?
Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around.
Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean.
Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
It's about students who are literally unable to parse sentence structure and grasp what's being described in a scene—ones who think that Michaelmas Term is the name of a character and that the image of a hypothetical Megolasaurus walking up the street is an actual dinosaur in the scene.
Try reading the paper linked here to see what the discussion is about, rather than (as the authors of the paper criticize) just guessing at what they should have meant.
In specific, this study was a test of reading comprehension, for English majors at a university level. They should be expected to do better with a complicated sentence then "it's really foggy, I guess". Just as I expect someone in film school to be able to give a more detailed review of a movie than "It was pretty good, you should go see it", even though that may be a perfectly acceptable review if a friend gives that to me.
Aside from that, there's actually isn't a lot more to it, which makes it an unfortunate sentence to focus on, because it results in a caricature of the study. "There's just fog everywhere" and "the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city" are just barely short of the desired results. It just happens that this mostly straightforward (not complicated) sentence lies between/among many other far less straightforward ones. The problem is glossing where it is inappropriate to do so—and being overly comfortable doing so—which the authors of the study criticize as "oversimplification":
> 96 percent of the problematic readers used oversimplified phrases at least once to summarize a sentence in the test passage while 61 percent used this method for five or more sentences. Often, subjects used this tactic as a shortcut when they became overwhelmed by a sentence with multiple clauses. One subject disclosed that oversimplifying was her normal tactic[…] Those subjects, however, who relied on oversimplification became more and more lost as they continued to read
The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.
Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture.
On another note: What are horse blinkers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs
The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry...
Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages.
Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird.
Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture.
Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms.
The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too.
I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
Is it the easiest thing to read? No.
Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs are on their way to destroy what's left.
A landmark study of this, pertaining to literary agents, was just published today: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/literary-agents-dont-read-h...
If an adult English speaker cannot understand the opening of Bleak House - quotes given elsewhere in this thread - they are effectively unable to access the bulk of English literature.
This is not someone who belongs in a university English course, this is someone in need of remedial English lessons.
If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the results would be perfectly acceptable. Why would you test literacy, a very practical skill, using anything other than contemporary language, the kind that they actually use in their day to day?
They were asked to read the opening chapter of Bleak House. It's pretty much standard English.
> LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln�s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes � gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
The only word I see there that isn't used the same way in bog standard American English is "wonderful." I will grant you that "Michaelmas" is obscure to an American, but "Michaelmas Term [] over" is clear enough: it's a specific span of time that has elapsed. You don't need to know exactly what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is any more than if you read
> I went to Carnegie Deli
and didn't know what Carnigie Deli is. It's obviously a deli.
To clarify, the study [0] mentioned in TFA and referenced by GP did not test literacy in the sense, "can this person read English?" Rather, it tested whether students had attained a level of "proficient-prose literacy," which equates to a score of 33+ on the Reading portion of the ACT.
A 33 on the ACT is a very good score (it's out of 36). The students were English majors, so it does not seem unreasonable to test whether they are proficient in this area. What exactly is the expectation when they pick up King Lear, or The Canterbury Tales?
Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.
This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.
Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and has a lot of the same difficulty, but people don't call it 'outdated' or treat it like a foreign language. These are just books you have to read slower than a news article, and that's alright, but there's a fine line between needing more time and not being able to get through it. That study showed it conclusively.
* Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning?
* Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures?
* Does the reader know a bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?
To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second. It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate.
An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.
The bar for any amount of academic discipline or rigor may as well be a stripe of masking tape on the floor.
[0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."
Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.
I guess it depends on how much you honour those who lit the way before you.
The Wright brothers just barely squeeze by the “19’th century” bar.
As the joke goes, 'I want some of what he's smoking.' Just. Wow.
Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum in high school is built around reading particular works by particular historical writers. The highlights of nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered in high school (and beyond - some of these people are seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember any works or authors from the nineteenth century would be equivalent to engineering major who can't remember any algebra.
Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of course)—I tutored folks in an “math for non-stem majors” sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer to their material than the math students, who’d all long ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point they started asking about foils, which was pretty confusing (they weren’t looking for anachronistically named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic for applying the distributive property twice, which I’d never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing directly.
I wonder if these college English students have similarly forgotten some names? I guess that’s sort of a long shot. I do think memorization of facts should be avoided, though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the underlying principle into your mental model instead.
The students in the study are responding in a rational way to the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their own work[^1]. The real task is then to flatter the teacher/professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work — and if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective, why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?
This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself: - one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs lumbering around London", because the authors think this language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced, there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or making fun of) that idea? - the authors criticize readers for relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other texts, especially old ones — does pulling from those make you a bad reader? - they say that a student only locates the fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than shipyards?)
I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text itself. But by the points students are in college they will have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal interpretations that don't produce the required result, and unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.
[^0] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-... [^1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...
English students are students, they are in school to learn things they don't know, not demonstrate what they already know. Looking at the numbers it goes from 0% proficient as freshman to 50% as juniors, drops with seniors but seniors often seem to be an outlier in these sorts of studies, probably because they have a great deal on their mind with the major changes their life is about to undergo.
While theoretically possible with non-linear media like videos and audio playback, the fluidity of reading is far superior. Thus, passive consumption leads to many fragments of ideas remaining atomized and not sticking. In contrast, reading allows one to efficiently stitch numerous ideas together.
The point of reading is not to become convinced or apprehend a single summarizable point. Rather, it is to fill one's memory banks with thoughts, experiences and ideas that can be combined with other ones and synthesize new information.
Contrast wandering though a botanical garden, reading labels and looking at plants on the one hand. On the other hand, picture a slow-moving bus that rolls continuously through the garden. The bus may pause from time to time, but mostly it remains on the path, letting you watch things go by from a distance. Both means of travel "get you through" the garden, but the self-pacing version allows a personal connection to the information.
So it would be convenient for a farmer to have his animals illiterate, yet capable of listening passively to commands over loudspeakers. And to the farmer, it would be inconvenient for these animals to learn to read and explore material on their own which would eventually lead them to an awareness that they don't want to be fenced in, farmed, and eaten. So you can see why some questionable leaders are comfortable with illiteracy as a means of control. While others seek to empower humanity through encouraging reading.
i imagine cultures that refined oral histories over generations ended up at a similar place, but that doesnt really happen nowadays. It really is true that instead of listening to a 3 hour podcast about a topic, you could probably get all that info within 30 minutes of reading.
Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.
There should be a way to do this 'manually' with an ebook paired with the audio book. As simple as timestamps embedded in the text?
And get off my lawn.
Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
edit:
> [...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.
Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to 100%
I'm not convinced this is providing any value in the way you're implying. When people talk about the cognitive benefits of writing, what they mean is writing which makes you organize your thoughts, and notice when they are messy and disjointed. I think a majority of the writing people do online is not of that form: instead it takes the form of emotional outbursts which essentially go directly from the amygdala to the fingers and barely involve the higher brain functions at all, much less trigger the kind of introspection and reflection that people mean when they say writing is good for you.
In other words, just as not all reading is equally valuable, I don't think all writing is either and I think almost all Internet writing is of the low-value kind.
Is this a feeling, or something you know from statistics?
Many of the teens I know (I'm a teacher) aren't writing blog posts, or even comments on Reddit. They're watching YouTube videos and not interacting back with anything more than a thumbs up.
Sure, some are writing on anime subreddits or whatever, but I don't want to make generalizations for what teens are doing across the US or the rest of the Western world without some kind of statistics.
I have a friend that published a kids book over the course of a weekend, it's for sale on Amazon. It's sold hardly any copies but it's been published
If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate description might be a random sample of phrases that spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.
To paraphrase some ideas poorly:
> "LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."
> "An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other."
The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.
It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.
Even in the past, Europeans were able to advance the knowledge and science only because their priorities and socio-political conditions allowed it, unlike other parts of the world which were always subjected to survival struggles.
Even if you pay you still get served ads, bombarded with trackers, and half the time publications make unsubscribing incredibly hostile (if not impossible online).
It's no wonder half the population gets their news solely from reshared headlines on social media.
New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books.
To a certain extent, translations which play with the presentation and complexity of the text have already been around for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the Bible.
Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology.
Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's The Road To Reality.
I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point.
I think AI is useful for sifting through high volumes of data to get the gist, but I don't really count it as it's own modality. It is by definition a watered down version of the training data that produced it, it lacks the human spark that makes content worthy of attention and analysis.
Some authoritarians also like vigilante violence and find it in The Punisher. Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.
Many people are perfectly capable of getting e.g. the moods, visuals, themes, ideas conveyed by poetry, and it simply doesn't match their taste. That doesn't make them morons, and to imply otherwise is snobbery.
I can enjoy fiction that doesn't match my worldview... and it doesn't change my worldview. I am immune to propaganda without the inability to appreciate it, or temporarily be entertained by it. And it has fascinated me my entire life that others must be molded into something new from fiction, or run screaming from it with their ears plugged up with nothing in between.
Perhaps the rest of you can do this too, and you're merely being ungenerous in your assumption that those whose politics you disagree with have so little psychological fortitude that they're incapable of the same. Or maybe you can't, and it scares you that they can.
Everyone does that. In star trek, race determines your temperament and skills. You do not see many calm Klingon scientists anywhere outside of their planet. Start Trek is also, basically, about humans being overall morally superior.
You can see whatever you want to see in the star trek.
shades of "i'm so deep compared to the other kids in my school"
If you read a translation of the Odyssey you can still gain a deep appreciation for the story. Do you think people from Homer's era would've lamented that people were reading the Odyssey instead of hearing it performed live? To my understanding, this was historically considered a key part of the Odyssey. The changing of modalities isn't something new.
Can you only appreciate the Tao Te Ching if you understand Chinese? This is one of the most deeply poetic works with multiple layers of meaning and interpretations. If you want to take a fully academic approach you can read literal translations of each character with side-by-side definitions and explanations. But I believe reading a translation can still convey the soul of the work.
For a more modern example: many people lament the proliferation of Let's Play videos on YouTube, where people record themselves playing through various games. Surely some would lament that you're missing the point by not playing through games yourself, but if the alternative is never having experienced the game and story, then maybe videos make a reasonable compromise.
If god appeared before you dressed as a beggar in the streets to give you life changing advice, I suspect that most would disregard it. The way in which a message is packaged is important, and not everyone is prepared to receive a message in any form, so it's best to meet them halfway and present it in a way that they can access.
Haha. Liars. Less than one percent, tops.
Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.
Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but running a hedge fund.
And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-pet...
> You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. > Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers > [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama
1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.
2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.
If you read enough books, you'll reach "vote-for-Trump mental acumen" again, if nothing else just to rile up the semi-literates.
Our imaginations and reasoning become capable of accreting and operating over much larger internal structures deeply and coherently, in the day to week time range.
The only other equivalent I can think of in terms of both scale and detail, are major areas of study, which we develop over years or a lifetime, or large engineering projects, such as a large architectural of software project, which we develop over months or a few years.
The much faster cadence of books on a daily or weekly basis is an incredible mental workout we can carry on our whole lives. And great preparation and maintenance, for being able to think at both the highest scales and resolutions.
I have seen children that got read to every night, when they were tiny, and went on to become avid readers as adults. And children in the same cohort that didn't, who find reading a book very challenging as adults. They are all grown up intelligent, curious, with good jobs, and still know each other. But there is a marked difference in their abilities to think about the world, and the scale of their thinking and interests.
Since these children were in a cohort, and still know each other, it is telling that the children that didn't learn to read and enjoy book length reading early in life, are well aware of that difference within the group, and have expressed the wish that they would have had more early exposure to reading books.
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For myself, I was read to as a tot, and then very socially isolated for most of my childhood, with the result that I learned to read voraciously for decades. And would go to great lengths to find ways to earn money to buy books.
But even I have a harder time now. There are a lot of insightful and quality blogs and articles to read on the internet, but after that displaced a lot of long book reading, I have noticed the latter presents a greater challenge for me. That it presents a challenge at all is a significant change.
Contrary to that, reading formal papers seems to be a great challenge for my mind, in terms of keeping it sharp. A lot of papers require a high intensity of thinking to fully understand.
Which strikes me as interesting, and perhaps an untapped opportunity for young readers. I don't know what the young reader fiction or non-fiction equivalent of a formal paper would be. But perhaps a short story mystery or intense subject dive, that required the reader to solve or apply the knowledge in some way would be an interesting format for children. Higher scale puzzle solving, in short form reading format.
Perhaps dense essays for children, but highly vetted/curated for being of of genuine natural interest to children. Across a very wide variety of areas, so children have great freedom to pursue their own interests without being pushed or funneled. Traditional childhood subjects of spontaneous study, like dinosaurs, cosmology, animals, cultures, ancient history, how to make things, would all be good areas.
I love the idea of having a recognizable format for these essays that somewhat mimics formal papers aesthetically. Gives the children a clear aesthetic signal of what is an intense "chapter sized book", vs. a regular book or other type of reading. And makes the adult activity of learning at the frontier, feel familiar to them very early on.
I believe a lot of ways children's potential is wasted is simply not introducing little bits of downstream patterns and aesthetics earlier. Children have an incredible ability to absorb simpler forms of complex "adult brain" subjects early. And when they do, they find the latter much less challenging and more interesting when they eventually encounter them in their full complex/challenging form. Simple feelings of familiarity are so helpful to us emotionally when we encounter a new challenges.
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### The Evolution of Reading
A few decades ago, *reading was a straightforward, private activity*, where individuals engaged with physical texts at their own pace. The internet, however, has fundamentally shifted this experience. While some still prefer traditional books, many now encounter texts through various digital platforms, often switching between formats like e-readers and audio narration. The constant presence of distractions like YouTube and Netflix means that reading today often requires a conscious effort to *choose not to stop*.
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### Declining Traditional Reading Rates
This shift has been particularly pronounced among younger generations. The *National Endowment for the Arts* reported a decline in adults reading at least one book a year, from *55% to 48%* over the decade leading up to 2023. More dramatically, the *National Center for Education Statistics* found that the number of *thirteen-year-olds who read for fun "almost every day" plummeted from 27% to 14%* in roughly the same period. This decline has led to increased concerns from college professors about students' ability to engage with complex, lengthy texts.
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### The "Gutenberg Parenthesis" and the Rise of AI
The text discusses the concept of the "Gutenberg Parenthesis," suggesting that the internet closed a historical period dominated by print, returning us to a more conversational and decentralized communication style. The rise of podcasts and newsletters supports this idea of a "secondary orality."
However, the emergence of *artificial intelligence (AI)*, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, introduces a new dimension to this evolution. These AI systems "read" and process unimaginable quantities of text at superhuman speeds, recalling information, drawing connections, and extracting insights. This has led some, like economist Tyler Cowen, to consider "writing for the AIs," envisioning a future where AI can analyze and preserve a writer's thought process.
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### AI-Assisted Reading and the Future of Text
AI's capabilities allow for *new forms of reading, such as on-demand abridgments and summaries*. Tools like Blinkist already offer condensed versions of books. AI can also simplify complex texts, as demonstrated by Claude rewriting the challenging opening of "Bleak House" into more modern English. This blurs the line between original texts and their summarized or altered versions, suggesting a future where readers might routinely start with alternative texts and only later seek out originals.
While some texts, like complex literary works, may lose their essence when summarized, and the value of authentic human voices will likely persist, the text posits that the *intrinsic integrity of writing might become less powerful*. The analogy of music sampling suggests that "remix culture" could extend to reading, where multiple versions of a text exist and are accepted.
The author reflects on their own intensive reading experiences as a Ph.D. student, highlighting the *finitude of human reading and memory*. AI, by contrast, can help find value in otherwise unread texts and potentially deepen reading memories by enabling ongoing interaction with information. However, AI lacks intrinsic motivation and relies on human "reading culture" for its usefulness.
The article concludes by contemplating a future where *text is fluid, fungible, and abstractable*. Getting the "gist" of a text will be easy, and encountering the original will become a conscious choice. This could lead to new writing styles, with some writers aiming to repel automated reading, and a shift in what it means to be "well-read." Text may transition from a finished product to a "stepping stone to something else."
Good luck finding that kind of ambient infrastructure for pleasure reading today…
I get that there's an emotional payoff to things like flowery prose. It helps put you in the mindset of the author / characters, which makes seeing them overcome whatever problems all the more satisfying. That's what I expect if I pick up a book about say, friends-since-birth being torn apart by war, with one entering the military and committing atrocities to reunite them.
On the other hand, if I pick up a book about deciphering alien language found on the moon, I'm not reading for the characters. I'm reading to see how hypothetical aliens would think. Which in practice is often "what would humans be like if we added / removed constraint X" (eg perfect empathy or genetic memory). In this case, lengthy prose and other character development just feel like filler. Like I don't actually care that the character became interested in linguistics after growing up on a farm and watching animal behavior. Just tell me about the aliens!
This the crux of this article which I agree with. Read it.
Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...
Some of the most enthusiastic readers I know are also opiate addicts.
I think maybe OP was using some obscure meme format. Or if it was genuine I am also interested how did the 500 hours came upon.
Literacy was needed to read the Bible and operate machinery, and now we have videos for that. Only (some of) the video makers need to read, so they can raid the libraries for material.
If you want to KNOW "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever.
If, instead, you want to READ ABOUT "What's Happening to Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you.
Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy or artificially busy with social media and other things that aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.