For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time.
Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.
Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
I suggest blocking all platforms providing short-form video and concretely deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g. 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit.
Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
Or even just setting up a timer, I've set up a 20 min timer for myself recently, once it's done I do stick to it, I did get to do some things I've been pushing away, I still get some value out of these but... I get a lot more by not spending an hour on them.
It's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality.
I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.
I generally refuse to engage with it. A while back I started scrolling some YouTube shorts. Hours later my brain felt fried and… it was hours later? It was kind of shocking and frightening. It felt like I had no memory of the past three hours, like it was a true state of hypnosis.
I realized this recently as well, on how much social media has started affected me. I've made some changes to how I use my phone now but haven't seen a lot of improvement overall, basically because I've found that there is "Social Media" everywhere I go. I removed all the Meta apps from my phone and found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. Removed that and I end up on Reddit. I do feel better about not being on FB and Instagram anymore though which I found were the biggest source of my wasted time. I'm not able to fully limit all the apps, and that may just come over time with better habits.
The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.
I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.
It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.
I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.
In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
I've always meant to try Banks. I'm going to add that to my list.
Another comment here a long time ago caused me to buy a copy of The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. I knew I'd probably like the book because it involved a person and their dog (stupid, I know) and I loved it! Heller's writing really clicks with me and I've read a few more of his books since and enjoyed them all. Even though I'm a very slow reader, none have taken me more than a week to read.
Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".
After getting a hankering for more Culture books, I recently started going through his other fiction and they're all really fun and scratch a similar itch. I read Feersum Endjinn and The Algebraist, and I'm most of the way through Against a Dark Background now, and they're all great (and quite different from The Culture and each other)
Yeah, reading for me is hot and cold streaks. I’ll read for 3-9mo straight, then go about the same not reading at all. Tends to coincide with life stress and work schedule for the most part, but also just picking up other interests that soak up time!
The UNESCO/World Bank literacy rate is basically defined how you thought. But high income countries don't usually report this because literacy by this measure is nearly universal. So they often report at higher thresholds (e.g. how many people can read at a grade 9 level), and news headlines often don't make it clear that this is not the same as the UNESCO definition.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,
Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.
For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.
One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum.
It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.
The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.
I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.
It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.
English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."
A good idea to consider might be what Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as "second-order illiteracy".
> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.
reading "Terms of Service" is useless if you are not also understanding Terms of Service, and once you understand Terms of Service, you also understand how you are being shafted by signing up to them since 99% of Terms of Service are for their benefit.
I propose a new metric: you feed any terms of Service into an AI that outputs "It will realistically cost you X litigious dollars to win against these terms." That's all the signee really needs to know.
> Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.
The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.
Not "the rest of history," but relative to the ~1800-2000 period of steadily increasing literacy and educational attainment.
The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.
>Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
There's actually some different content covered later in the article, but yes it is quite long. I'm sure plenty of people consume articles like these by asking LLMs for a summary.
I actually read the article first, but I find it too long, and unnecessarily so. I am a huge proponent of reading, especially for the acquisition of new knowledge and perspectives, but I consider this form of writing rather entitled, beating around the bush and demanding too much of my time and attention just to make a point or two.
I completely agree. No wonder this form of “journalism” is in decline. It feels so self-indulgent and lacking in awareness of how precious attention really is.
Some jazz hands 'cause I don't want to upset the sensitive Atlantic readership. No, did not read it, did read Clockwork Orange back in high school, still reading every day 42 years later but then I did not attend an Ivy League uni in the 2020's so that probably explains a lot.
I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.
Were they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done.
Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.
That merely shows that a very basic education is more widespread. One thing that's always struck me, listening to letters read aloud in history shows, is the eloquence and mastery of the language they possessed.
TLDR: fewer people may have been literate, but the ones who were, were damned good writers.
Even in the 1800s the literacy rate in the US was over 50% (the highest in the world), because it was founded by "sola scriptura" Protestants for whom Bible reading was a religious duty.
I'm inclined to believe that the decline of our education system is intentional. Certain people don't want the masses to be capable of critical thinking.
I wholeheartadly believe that new generations can't be forever better in everything than the previous ones. There will come a time of stagnation or even decline.
So there is absolutely nothing wrong in decline. It's mathematically necessary. (Well, stagnation, or slow increase is also possible.)
I also don't think that the only function of the education system is to score higher and higher on tests, it has so many other functions: keep kids happy, turn kids into happy adults, lower the tensions is society, create a better world for everyone, etc.
There wouldn't be much point of scoring better in tests if it resulted in unhappy kids, unhappy adults, broken society, broken world, now would it?
> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.
Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.
There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
Hmm. If someone knew the number of graduates from 2017 to 2026, they could estimate what fraction of them could paraphrase and make inferences.
My stab at it: Looks like about 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026. The US population is about 350 million.
20% of 350 million is 70 million, so 70 million people couldn't paraphrase in 2017. 30% is 105 million, so 105 million people couldn't in 2026. That means that of the 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026, only one million of them could paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text?
I know the US educational system is a mess, but I find it hard to believe that it's quite that much of a mess. Can anyone point out flaws in the math?
That assumes the shift was entirely due to high school students becoming adults. There are also people who haven't read much over those years and have had their skills declined to the point of failure. Or, also likely, sample size issues.
You're making the assumption that the change in absolute terms is entirely driven by deficient additions to the population. It's just as possible that some portion of the population lost their skill by allowing it to atrophy from underuse.
Each of these quotes is from a different part of that Wikipedia page:
> It involves guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context clues, as opposed to phonics, the more traditional method of sounding out words.
> Three cueing methods have been criticized for misunderstanding how reading is acquired and for potentially damaging children's reading abilities over the long term.
> In response to the example of children failing to distinguish between "pony" and "horse", Goodman argued that it was irrelevant whether children understood the specific word, as "pony" and "horse" are similar concepts, and a reader failing to distinguish between them would still understand the meaning of the story as a whole.
> Some researchers and educators have attributed part of three cueing's popularity in classrooms to its ease of teaching relative to phonics.
> As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing.
I’ve flagged the article and I would suggest others do the same. The Atlantic never posts things that satisfy the hacker spirit in any way. It is almost always puffery and melodrama meant to attract clicks and views, but the subject matter itself is trite and not worth discussing on a hacker forum.
Interesting phenomens are often discussed here so I personally do not perceive it as offtopic. Yet as you said, I have the same feeling from this article. Click bait grievance posting.
We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read.
Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.
But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.
I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.
Then maybe you should not read prose. It is about conveying an experience, a story. You might have simply picked a bad author. Personally, I prefer long reads. I understand that some people might not enjoy that style of storytelling, but saying “give up reading” overall is a shame. Try something like Warhammer 40k novels. They are simple, entertaining, and split into shorter parts. What you are describing does not happen there.
I read The Goldfinch a while back. Not at all my usual fare. The plot progressed at a snail's pace, but I enjoyed every page of it. (The movie treatment was horribly shallow in comparison, but there's no way they could possibly convey the depth in two hours.)
> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."
It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.
There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.
Progamming in a corporate/business environment was not prestigious or high paying then either. It was a decent job, don't get me wrong, but something more similar to accounting or other back-office work in terms of pay and prestige.
Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.
What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.
As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.
Honestly it doesn't matter much, go grab a random book from goodwill. If you do "need" a recommendation, I'd suggest "Roots", I'm reading it now and it's amazingly well written.
One suggestion I would make is to read something from before 1980. No real reason why, but books from 1900 - 1980 work better for me personally, not sure why.
I gave up reading when I got my first portable computer. Not sure why. But after some time I got sick of it and got back to reading and I love it!
For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.
I think this is a hyporbole but I sort of get what they're saying. I was personally put off from reading novels for a long time because the way it was taught in high school made it seem like I have to analyze every little tiny detail in a book, and then get tested on whether or not my interpretation was "correct".
I re-started reading in my late 20s and love it now. I focus on either enjoying what I'm reading or learning something new instead of going over everything with a fine tooth comb like I was taught. It was difficult to get started again as the reading habits I built as a teenager made it seem like a chore/punishment instead of something positive.
> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.
Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.
if you wear yourself out mentally all day as part of your occupation, digging into a "good" book is often too much work.
As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.
I relate to this. My brain is fried after a long day of work, and the last thing I have the energy for is reading something challenging. It’s either light reading, or more often (which I’m a little sad about), watching something.
We read, a lot, but not books. We read manuals, get started docs, apis, git repos, AI responses, wikipedia, tik tok comments just for fun, we read constantly and will read till the end of times. That's the way we learn and entertain ourselves, there is no other way around that.
You are a programmer? You understand that different firmwares and operative systems work in different ways and excel at different things?
For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?
This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.
If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.
I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.
Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.
And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.
How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?
> Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.
The rise of vibecoding and the disdain many in the industry hold for the skill of software development should fully disabuse you of any vestiges of this notion...
Every single day, here, on "Hacker" news I see folks describe coding as just a means to an end, and that things like code quality, architecture, etc, don't matter.
Welcome to late stage capitalism, where if you can't immediately monetize it its not worth doing (consider how this might explain the rise of gambling as recreation).
> you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.
So HN is OK with being extremely condescending toward others as long as it's a general group of others, not a specific HN user? Just imagine this sentence with almost any other activity:
"You don't like to run? I would have assumed that people who enjoy physical activity would be into real exercise, but I guess they're all actually lazy."
"You don't play an instrument? I would have assumed people who like music would be into creativity, but I guess I was wrong and they're all boring and uncreative."
It is the height of arrogance to assume that people who don't enjoy the same things you like are obviously stupid, lazy losers. And yes, that's absolutely what you are doing in your comment. You seriously cannot imagine any other form of intellectual stimulation that they might be into instead?
Brother, I took a look at your comment history and I think you're projecting.
I also noticed on your profile that you've submitted literally nothing to this site but have made lots of comments, usually negative ones.
To paraphrase Justified: if you met an arrogant person in the morning, you met an arrogant person in the morning. If you meet arrogant people all day...
Just yesterday, someone on LinkedIn wanted to improve her vibe-coded software, which she plans to charge money for.
I recommended an article of mine with a 34 minute read time. When she saw that in the header, she submitted my article to an AI for summary and complained that she wasn't going to spend 34 minutes (on learning programming).
It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
You’ve drawn the wrong conclusion. People still read on the train because there is rarely phone signal when underground. If phones were internet capable during commutes, you’d see a lot less books.
> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
>> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
> Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
Even accepting that Project Hail Mary, Obsession, and Top Gun are "good movies" (which I completely reject), you're cherry-picking. The top three films of the year are Super Mario Galaxy, Michael, and The Devil Wears Prada 2.
'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
> bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
How does this viewpoint account for the times when "capitalism" was, by all objective measures, worse for laborers? I.E. the early industrialization period when laborers worked 14-16 hour days alongside children in factories and mines, risking life and limb?
The brief nightmare where workers had enough power to demand better conditions is thankfully ending, and we can return the happy days where workers would slave away for just enough compensation to sustain themselves, and they'd be happy to do it because they had no better options.
I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.
That's exactly why I'm no longer interested in cinema. When year after year it was some Marvel chuckleknuckle fantasy after the writer's strike it was obvious Hollywood was struggling and had zero imagination anymore.
Even the word 'nerd' got reduced to Trekkie and Star Wars fandom when it used to mean tech enthusiast.
>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do.
Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.
I wish there was a local news paper around me. There are national news papers with a local edition, but they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.
>they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.
National newspapers don't have reporters digging for stories any more as well. Actually, for many years.
90% of newspapers are buying or reposting their stories from news agencies, such as Bloomberg or Thomson-Reuters.
90% of their activity (in turn) is rewriting press-releases and going to press-conferences of top 500 companies and government bureaus.
In the CIS we have "local telegram channels", but they are mostly run by magistrates' press secretaries, and usually don't report on anything significant, and usually just praise the district prefect and post thinly veiled ads.
For national or international news I feel if it matters I will find out. However I'm in the dark about what happens in my state. My city is even worse - and those are places an informed voter can make a difference.
Same with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.
It's not a hard and fast rule, for sure. But we have heard from many boy parents who wish their boys read more (or much at all). We, OTOH, have to tell our girls to put their books down and do something else from time to time.
It does. People who bet on sports sink hundreds of hours into forums and consuming visual content. Placing a bet takes 30 seconds, deciding what to bet on takes people a very long time. As long as reading a book.
I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time people put into researching. A very small minority, sure, but most sports bettors look at the lines and pick.
Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership).
The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.
> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
> The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:
I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
You do actually need to read huge swaths of information to understand the relevant information. A good nonfiction book isn't long because of low information density: it's because the ideas are so complicated that it takes an entire book to explain it. Your approach is emblematic of a modern trend where people know a bunch of smart factoids but have no broader wisdom or understanding.
Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.
I do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information.
Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.
More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.
You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.
Your example is an interesting one, as the Reagan administration is a broad topic with many books covering just a small slice. If you are solely interested in the foreign policy of Reagan, you could find books on Iran-Contra, SDI, Grenada, the American response to the Soviet-Afghan war, the Reykjavik Summit etc.
Wikipedia is a great resource and I use it a lot, but it is far from a complete solution for topics with any depth. If I read an article on a president, I'll get a brief overview of their administration as well as a few interesting facts and could probably answer a jeopardy question about them, but I would not claim a strong understanding.
I will agree that not every bit of information can be found in a book, but the ability to comprehend book-level arguments and ideas is critical. They are a necessary, but not sufficient component of learning.
There are very few non-fiction books that actually need their space to communicate their idea, instead of doing it in a chapter and filling the rest of it to reach some word-count target.
> he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). [emphasis added]
Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.
But books also have drawbacks:
1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.
2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.
3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.
There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.
If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.
In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.
Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.
And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'
What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'
So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.
I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.
Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.
Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.
There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).
“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.
In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:
> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
It's also New Wave science fiction, and once you get past the conlang and the genre conventions, it's still incredibly violent! Kubrick iirc even once said in an interview that he removed some book scenes from his (initially X-rated) film adaptation, because he thought the invented language helped make them less disturbing to read, but audiences watching them dramatized would just give up and walk out. Anyway I sure do see some of the trends described in the article with my younger students and relatives, but such a strange unforced error makes me suspicious of the strength of the research.
i got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back.
I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.
I couldn't attach my xteink to my phone because of a standoff around the camera on my phone case. I just now realized that the standoff could be removed and now the magnet works! :)
Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it.
Whether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents?
Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?
Are you reading this? Consider yourself a reader. I quit reading The Atlantic a decade ago due to their hot takes. Slate and Salon a decade before that. If you read Reddit and romance, you’re literate.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] threadNowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.
I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.
Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
My go-to is “trash” military sci-fi. Usually from authors who pump out a book or two a year in the genre.
Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is my general go-to, although these days I’m caught up so I’ve started a few others like it.
Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.
I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.
I generally refuse to engage with it. A while back I started scrolling some YouTube shorts. Hours later my brain felt fried and… it was hours later? It was kind of shocking and frightening. It felt like I had no memory of the past three hours, like it was a true state of hypnosis.
The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.
Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.
It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.
In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
Another comment here a long time ago caused me to buy a copy of The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. I knew I'd probably like the book because it involved a person and their dog (stupid, I know) and I loved it! Heller's writing really clicks with me and I've read a few more of his books since and enjoyed them all. Even though I'm a very slow reader, none have taken me more than a week to read.
Thanks, will read them.
Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.
For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.
One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).
It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.
The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.
I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.
It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.
English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)
Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."
> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.
I propose a new metric: you feed any terms of Service into an AI that outputs "It will realistically cost you X litigious dollars to win against these terms." That's all the signee really needs to know.
What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.
The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.
Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.
Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:
https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp
I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.
The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.
>Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
They generally get their point across and then rattle on for more time than I am interested in reading.
Guess I'm part of the post literate world. I also perfer short stories instead of novels.
Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.
TLDR: fewer people may have been literate, but the ones who were, were damned good writers.
So there is absolutely nothing wrong in decline. It's mathematically necessary. (Well, stagnation, or slow increase is also possible.)
I also don't think that the only function of the education system is to score higher and higher on tests, it has so many other functions: keep kids happy, turn kids into happy adults, lower the tensions is society, create a better world for everyone, etc.
There wouldn't be much point of scoring better in tests if it resulted in unhappy kids, unhappy adults, broken society, broken world, now would it?
> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.
There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
We often judge those changes but we are notoriously bad at consciously predicting the future our collective unconscious often does.
My stab at it: Looks like about 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026. The US population is about 350 million.
20% of 350 million is 70 million, so 70 million people couldn't paraphrase in 2017. 30% is 105 million, so 105 million people couldn't in 2026. That means that of the 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026, only one million of them could paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text?
I know the US educational system is a mess, but I find it hard to believe that it's quite that much of a mess. Can anyone point out flaws in the math?
Each of these quotes is from a different part of that Wikipedia page:
> It involves guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context clues, as opposed to phonics, the more traditional method of sounding out words.
> Three cueing methods have been criticized for misunderstanding how reading is acquired and for potentially damaging children's reading abilities over the long term.
> In response to the example of children failing to distinguish between "pony" and "horse", Goodman argued that it was irrelevant whether children understood the specific word, as "pony" and "horse" are similar concepts, and a reader failing to distinguish between them would still understand the meaning of the story as a whole.
> Some researchers and educators have attributed part of three cueing's popularity in classrooms to its ease of teaching relative to phonics.
> As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing.
Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.
But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.
It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.
There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.
What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.
As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination
https://devoneriksen.com/products/theft-of-fire-orbital-spac...
But take a look at anything by Asimov. I have a collection of his short stories and it is a nice read. Oh, and any short story collection by Chekhov.
One suggestion I would make is to read something from before 1980. No real reason why, but books from 1900 - 1980 work better for me personally, not sure why.
Novels are fiction by the way.
For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.
I re-started reading in my late 20s and love it now. I focus on either enjoying what I'm reading or learning something new instead of going over everything with a fine tooth comb like I was taught. It was difficult to get started again as the reading habits I built as a teenager made it seem like a chore/punishment instead of something positive.
Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.
In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.
As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.
For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?
This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.
If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.
Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.
And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.
How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?
The rise of vibecoding and the disdain many in the industry hold for the skill of software development should fully disabuse you of any vestiges of this notion...
Every single day, here, on "Hacker" news I see folks describe coding as just a means to an end, and that things like code quality, architecture, etc, don't matter.
Welcome to late stage capitalism, where if you can't immediately monetize it its not worth doing (consider how this might explain the rise of gambling as recreation).
So HN is OK with being extremely condescending toward others as long as it's a general group of others, not a specific HN user? Just imagine this sentence with almost any other activity:
"You don't like to run? I would have assumed that people who enjoy physical activity would be into real exercise, but I guess they're all actually lazy."
"You don't play an instrument? I would have assumed people who like music would be into creativity, but I guess I was wrong and they're all boring and uncreative."
It is the height of arrogance to assume that people who don't enjoy the same things you like are obviously stupid, lazy losers. And yes, that's absolutely what you are doing in your comment. You seriously cannot imagine any other form of intellectual stimulation that they might be into instead?
I also noticed on your profile that you've submitted literally nothing to this site but have made lots of comments, usually negative ones.
To paraphrase Justified: if you met an arrogant person in the morning, you met an arrogant person in the morning. If you meet arrogant people all day...
I recommended an article of mine with a 34 minute read time. When she saw that in the header, she submitted my article to an AI for summary and complained that she wasn't going to spend 34 minutes (on learning programming).
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
> Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.
Even the word 'nerd' got reduced to Trekkie and Star Wars fandom when it used to mean tech enthusiast.
Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.
National newspapers don't have reporters digging for stories any more as well. Actually, for many years.
90% of newspapers are buying or reposting their stories from news agencies, such as Bloomberg or Thomson-Reuters.
90% of their activity (in turn) is rewriting press-releases and going to press-conferences of top 500 companies and government bureaus.
In the CIS we have "local telegram channels", but they are mostly run by magistrates' press secretaries, and usually don't report on anything significant, and usually just praise the district prefect and post thinly veiled ads.
For national or international news I feel if it matters I will find out. However I'm in the dark about what happens in my state. My city is even worse - and those are places an informed voter can make a difference.
I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either.
Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.
I still read, but it has taken the form of social media which have no more length than a blurb.
The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.
> The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:
You do actually need to read huge swaths of information to understand the relevant information. A good nonfiction book isn't long because of low information density: it's because the ideas are so complicated that it takes an entire book to explain it. Your approach is emblematic of a modern trend where people know a bunch of smart factoids but have no broader wisdom or understanding.Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.
Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.
More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.
You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.
Wikipedia is a great resource and I use it a lot, but it is far from a complete solution for topics with any depth. If I read an article on a president, I'll get a brief overview of their administration as well as a few interesting facts and could probably answer a jeopardy question about them, but I would not claim a strong understanding.
I will agree that not every bit of information can be found in a book, but the ability to comprehend book-level arguments and ideas is critical. They are a necessary, but not sufficient component of learning.
She and her, the author is a woman.
But books also have drawbacks:
1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.
2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.
3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.
There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.
If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.
In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.
Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.
And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'
What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'
So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.
I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.
Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.
Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.
In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:
> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.
Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it.
For reading on my phone Moon Reader is my go-to.
Then the piece goes on to complain that people aren’t reading books, as though not reading books is tantamount to illiteracy?
This was complete nonsense.
Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?
Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”
* Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format.
* Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected.
* Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search.
* Silent speech.
These features can be achieved with alternative technologies.
Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.