I am also not a lifelong reader, I didn't start reading until college. My girlfriend read a ton and the first Lord of the Rings movie was about to come out, I got caught up in the excitement and read all the books. Ever since then, I've read pretty steadily. Interesting though, it wasn't social media or anything that slowed my reading to a trickle, it was audiobooks. I freakin love them when the narrator is good. Anyway, that's how I got back to reading and now I haven't listened to an audiobook in a while. :)
But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.
My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.
As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.
To that end, if your goal is just to read more, there is no reason to worry about how substantial your books are. However, if you goal is to read more substantially, you should start by aiming a bit higher than where you are. Achieve that, then adjust target.
Progress, then, can come either in more volume of reading where you are; or in more substantive reading. Either are valid, to me.
To take this to the exercise. If your goal is to do a fast mile, agreed that just walking the dog is unlikely to help. If your goal is to be physically active, simple walks punch well above what people think they do.
Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!
Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?
There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving such a conclusion.
Something like "parallel construction" for law enforcement.
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.
>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.”
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.
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.
In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.
You're not actually learning anything then. Memorizing trivia, sure. But not actually learning.
Correction: you love the feeling of consuming information, not learning.
People can learn from watching a documentary just as well as they can learn from reading, but reading teaches you how to interpret language as you continue reading, and other forms of information delivery convey understanding of their own mediums in their own ways. I would not have learned how to quickly spot a terrible documentary over a great one if I had not watched so many in my life. It doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything because I watched and listened instead of read, it just means that I didn’t read the documentaries.
Pro tip: don’t correct people about their own lives.
Part of disagreement probably stems from what type of 'learning' we're discussing. In my view, at the broadest sense that we can define 'learning', is incorporating information about our surroundings into our internalized world model. The type of learning I see most valuable personally, is the type that expands this horizon the most, or helps us think in frameworks that break down the least in different contexts.
This type of foundational building often requires deep thought, but is also often deeply rewarding if you get it right. This doesn't require reading by itself, but ruminating and neural rewiring can often be produced by it, if you consume the right content for you. I think it's important to have different experiences, many of which come from consuming different mediums, as well as doing things in real life, but a significant part of knowledge to this day has been passed down by books.
Even if we mean 'learning' to be more similar to 'gathering information', I think it can be most efficiently done by reading, or doing. I don't hold as much disagreement there, nor any judgement, but I wouldn't equate the two. Perhaps a bit pedantic, but I read 'liking learning' beyond the means by which it's achieved, and 'hating reading' reads temperamental to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.
It's been a great way to solidify friendships, broaden my interests (Not every book that's been voted on was one I'd have picked alone), and cultivate a habit of reading and enjoying meaningful time with people.
I highly recommend anybody with friends who might be interested to reach out and give it a shot! It's been a delight! I've even branched off into hosting a movie club now with the same idea, just pick a movie weekly and watch it asynchronously, then hop on a call to discuss :)
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.
> [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.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/IN+PRAISE+OF+ILLITERACY.-a062...
(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)
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).
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."
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.
Thanks, will read them.
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.)
> 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".
Yes, but do you only do things for pleasure if they're done quickly? Is your sex always over in a minute?
Also, I was responding to this:
> Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Yes, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a different measure than "placed a bet last year", but "read a book of any kind in 2022" is the same length of time, though not the exact same year.
This is a valid critique, but the motivations are not the same for reading books and gambling. Both are done partly for entertainment, but reading is partly for edification whereas gambling is partly for making money (in theory, at least). People want to make money almost universally, whereas ongoing edification is something that people do not enjoy intrinsically (meaning they would do it less if it takes more time).
> Yes, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a different measure than "placed a bet last year", but "read a book of any kind in 2022" is the same length of time, though not the exact same year.
I critiqued the two comparisons separately for a reason. One conflated a time-consuming activity with a quick one, and the other conflated time periods of comparison. I do not claim that both critiques apply to both cases, just that each comparison is flawed.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
If the SAT stops testing the ability to deal with multi-paragraph text, then schools will spend less time teaching those skills.
The less rigorous the filtering, the more you have to accommodate the lower ends of the incoming students’ abilities. So as standardized testing is softened, so too is the curriculum that students are exposed to.
There is a movement against standardized testing that gained traction in the past decade, arguing that because it’s flawed and imperfect we should abandon it. The movement never had a good replacement for it, though, so the shift was toward looser standards and judging students based on vibes and non-academic measures. Many of the universities that went this direction are reversing course and adding standardized testing back now because the reality of higher education is that you need to filter incoming students by some academic measurements if you want to be able raise the bar for your curriculum.
The effects cascade everywhere. In a perfect utopia everyone would get individualized perfect tutoring and we wouldn’t have to worry about testing, but in the world we inhabit a lot of the education decisions and realities are downstream of what we can test for.
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?
We often judge those changes but we are notoriously bad at consciously predicting the future our collective unconscious often does.
> Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults.
I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.
Personally, I read and write every day. I usually have 2-3 books I'm going through at any one time.
I've noticed that on long-haul flights, the movies typically hold no interest and I just read for hours—what a luxury to have nothing else to do!
We gave away our TV. The shows were just less compelling, we found. We don't miss it.
I feel like we tried to catch the wave, and almost did, but we were unable. It rolled out from under us and now we're floating once again in the calm sea beyond.
I have Moonreader installed on my phone, so I can reach for a book any time. This morning I was hypothesizing that since I use my phone for reading books, I'm fooling my brain into that association and maybe that's helpful in consuming long-form content online...?
I also read paper books, a Kobo, my computer, and an Xteink x4. Really anything, I guess!
That hardest part is knowing that more has been written than I will ever have time to enjoy.
I sympathize with people who truly do not have the time, but that's different from most people who simply choose not to spend their time reading or writing.
Who are these people? Why do they not have the same 24 hours you and I do?
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.
Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
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 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.
On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.
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.
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
Eg I've just finished watching Andor for the 3rd time, normal speed.
Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end.
But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content.
Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.
Movies meanwhile had a long time between the next one and so you couldn't get people deeply involved in the characters. However you had enough to pull off a slightly complex plot and so that is what movies did.
Short form video on YouTube, TikTok, and various AI short form video apps are also spiking in popularity.
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.
Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary
Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
/s
Apparently the peak year for Hollywood was 2002, with $9.2b domestic box office (16.1b inflation adjusted).
Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000.
Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.
And beyond that if you go deeper, the revenue growth is almost entirely attribured to higher prices in ticket sales while attendance in real terms continues to decline.
What are you struggling with here?
Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.
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.
I could watch TV passively (I don't watch TV, but I could). However if you switched my TV for one that received only Spanish - I have enough Spanish that I could understand, but it wouldn't be passive for me, it would be hard work to understand.
How did people get worse at reading, other than choosing to spend time on the alternative activities that I listed? You may be reversing cause and effect.
Obviously I meant mentally passive, not physically passive.
Neither did I.
Anyway, I don't buy the "energy" story, that doomscrolling is somehow low-energy, or even that people can't muster the energy for any activity other than doomscrolling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kids come out as a person, with strong opinions and desires. You can shave off some rough edges, and maybe bend a few branches of their experience.
But if you present a kid with the opportunity to read, and they read, you can’t take much credit. That’s just who they are. Others are given the opportunity and don’t.
You can fail to provide the opportunity, but after that, it’s pretty much up to the kid.
As a life long reader, on my own, and to my kid, including many a night time baby -> toddler -> easy chapter -> harder chapter read, my kid doesn’t read books. Certainly competent to do so, but just doesn’t. Possibly we could have continued to deny access to Netflix until later (it was 1 hour a week until about 10). No YouTube allowed. Still, didn’t read. Other kids do, and I’m jealous.
Uhm, what about Facebook, web-based news articles, and internet message boards? What about video games that involve significant reading?
The above statement is just so biased about what reading is, that I discarded the article as alarmist!
Just because someone isn't reading what you want them to, doesn't make them illiterate.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.
"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"
https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...
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:
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.
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.
People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.
I don't read books though. I've probably read one novel in the past five years. I used to read more books, newspapers, and magazines and can't really say why I don't anymore other than the news and magazine content is all online now, and it just doesn't seem like there is time left in the day to sit down with a book.
> The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London.
It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity.
Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.
Except the people our society views as intellectual elites can't read that well. Every tech billionaire demonstrates a fatal lack of meaningful literacy, and everyone who shares your opinion disqualifies themselves. It's a running joke [1].
Either our elites aren't that elite, and we should ignore their vicious misanthropy, or they are, but their evidence is faulty (and so we should ignore their vicious misanthropy). More succinctly, Preacher points out that the people with the strongest superiority complexes tend to be the worst examples of the relevant trait [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/guckwf/life_imi...
And, yes, some people are smarter than others. Some people are a lot smarter than others. Also, smart people are rare. Very smart people are very rare. These are basic facts of life that continue to exist whether or not you believe in them. Ignore them at your own risk.
There is literally no reason to believe this; having money is no proxy for intelligence, and tech CEOs specifically--the ones who fell hook line and sinker for craze after craze after craze--really aren't a solid argument here. We can be confident that a randomly selected person is unlikely to believe that an LLM loves them, or that there will be settlements on Mars in two years, or that they can live forever with blood transfusions. We cannot say the same of tech CEOs.
More importantly, we don't have to use money as a proxy at all here--we started with literature understanding, and at that we know the tech CEOs are not running circles around anybody. Here's just one example of Musk not understanding art [1].
I'd agree that highly intelligent people are rare, but I don't think that's as important as another fact: none of the actually highly intelligent people share your opinion. The belief that everyone without money is a dull-eyed serf is exclusively the province of cranks.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jun/19/elon...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
(then again, if I have the time to write an unnecessary comment, then I also have the time to read something)
Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.
I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.
So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.
> So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.
Our society doesn't warrant its own existence if the only considered criterion is how much value we can extract from each other.
Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor.
I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that.
Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.
* 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.
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.
Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”
Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.
More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.
Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them.
Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.
What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.
Depending on your place in the class hierarchy, and the orientation of your moral compass, this may or may not be a good thing.