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Comment by trashb | Hacker News Reader

  And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before.

This sentence undermines the whole article.

People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading".

The shape of reading is changing yes. I think the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea. Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online. In some way losing this kind of stigma will make reading more accessible.

Writing and publishing is dying first. And that has to go long before reading dies anyway.

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"the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea" - precisely. This is all about massaging the categories such that consuming or producing a given type of media in a particular style is "good" and everything else is inadequate.

So if I read a bunch of tech manuals, I'm not a reader because it's not fine literature?

What if I read them as PDFs? What if I print them? Where's the line?

I think we ought to call it something other than simply "reading", because the author seems to be leveraging the dual-meaning of that word to make their point more strongly. But "consuming literature for enjoyment" doesn't come off quite as spicy as pretending that others that don't are illiterate.

Some random thoughts:

It is very odd, I do more deep reading then ever before but its curated through llms.

I do the exploration then the dive on papers.

Many novels we love were released as serials.

I haven't gotten stuck trying to understand an idea because its poorly explained in a book in a while.

I think humans have been very inefficient at finding gaps in logical progression in explanations because anyone who already knows it subconsciously skips steps in the explanation.

That said, llms, woof. Still so much misunderstood.

> Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online

Agree that we should work on reducing the stigma around reading (which, incidentally, feels ridiculous to type); but very clearly one of these exercises your mind and one doesn't. People should want to learn things!

That's mostly a value judgement though.

What about fiction vs non-fiction? Travel vs escapism? This is hugely subjective, and very personal. What one person finds educational could be a navel gazing time wasting pursuit to someone else.

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