The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
I'm mildly affected by "modern web" issues, and I reckon that the imaginative part of my brain is in a coma whenever I browse these sites. The minute I'm outside of an internet connection, a whole lot of emotions, ideas, plans come back at once. And very very rarely can I browse the web while not losing that. This is something I didn't experience before... say smartphones, even with a good dsl line, i wasn't dilluted in pages likes that.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
I experience the same thing when I travel, especially when I travel on foot or by bicycle. These long periods of low stimulus thought are really helpful. It makes me want to do a lot of things off-screen.
When I am home I really struggle to put things into practice because the easiest thing to do when I wake up is to look at my phone before I sit at my computer.
I do a lot of meaningful work on the computer, but I’m uneasy about how frictionless it is to just be on the computer and never act in the real world.
You’re commenting on an article about reading, which is also a solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you’re not trying to make the point that reading books destroys relationships and self construction, so this seems like a roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption activity is better than what other people choose.
Reading a book is not really passive. Especially if it's a good book. You have to constantly imagine the layouts and the connections the book is trying to draw. For me, after years of Internet, getting back to books made me appreciate my younger self because books need active imagination and follow-through in the brain. I was able to do that effortlessly when I was a child. In fact, if you read all the HN comments the way you read books, it will be challenging(if you have no book reading habits).
I don't use imagination when I read. The connections are instinctual, and the layouts are often irrelevant (which I can say because I've never attempted to consider them and don't ever find myself missing out on the story).
I'd like to say I'm astounded when I hear other people visit other worlds when they read, but really that whole idea is so foreign to me, it might as well be a complete lie. I have no thread in which to pull on to begin to imagine it. I chalk it up to aphantasia, but my point is that not everyone processes and interacts with the world in the same way you might.
So when a scene is described, what happens in your head? You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts? If someone gets punched in the face that conjures an image of a fist connecting with a face for me.
> You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts?
"dry list" was your description, not mine. But also, no. Take the common example;
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
You don't have to imagine a picture of shoes, nor of a for sale sign to go... "oh, shit...".
Or even even that's too far to grasp... consider the melody of happy song, or a sad song. I assume you don't imagine a piano to figure out which it is?
Yes, I was trying to figure out how that would work, describing how I imagined it as a starting point. Not saying that’s how you experience it (hence the question mark)
I don’t have to imagibe baby shoes to understand what they are, or what happened, but if I read ‘baby shoes’ there’s definitely an image of small shoes appearing in my mind (constantly morphing, because the description doesn’t give me anything to go off).
If I read ‘sad song’, some variation of a sad song will play in my mind.
Of course often you read many of those things in sequence, and the mental scene constructs itself as you learn more.
If you read quickly it’s a bit vague, not enough time to truly think about it, but it’s there. At least for me.
> “Bitch,” he repeated. The mallet came down. She shoved herself upward and it landed just below her kneecap. Her lower leg was suddenly on fire. Blood began to trickle down her calf. And then the mallet was coming down again. She jerked her head away from it and it smashed into the stair riser in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, scraping away the flesh from her ear.
Does your mind conjure no images while reading this?
Aphantasia is hard to explain, especially in a drive by comment.
I'm not the person you're replying to but the answer, for me, depends on what you really mean by conjuring images. Very technically no, I see no images for this but I don't know if that is truly the whole point of what you're asking.
I mostly understand what is happening but I also really struggle to get the angles right in my mind of someone swinging a mallet quickly and one time hitting a shin and the next aimed for the head so maybe I'm missing something.
There are other senses involved as well even though it isn't visual, including things like spatial reasoning or maybe even something like proprioception - like I said it's hard to explain.
I can imagine myself in this position better than I can "visualize" it happening to someone else.
Aphantasia is really annoying to explain to people, like trying to explain blindness to a person who's always seen. I can't "see" anything, but I'm able to reason about it and kinda trace what I imagine with my eyes.
Interestingly enough, I have very lucid dreams and have realized that I am able to visualize (with color!) inside of them. I can't imagine being able to do that at will while awake, must be amazing.
I also can "see" in my dreams! Aphantasia is so fascinating to me because it helps me think about all these senses in much smaller units. I think the more we study and learn about aphantasia the better we will understand the brain in general. It is kind of like a natural experiment where you can remove one piece of the system and reason about the whole because of what changes.
For example, I had never considered that there would be different processes involved with imagining something visual vs recalling it but now that seems super obvious to me! I love when something tweaks my perspective and suddenly a new world of possibilities is revealed.
This happens with all forms of art, it's not unique to the written word. With movies and TV you're imagining the world outside the frame borders. With paintings you're imagining the whole scene or story depending on the piece.
So there's a point here that TikTok is competing for leisure time that in its absence has a better chance of being imaginative but I think that undersells the creativity of social media to a degree.
I think that's the key thing. Social media bombards us with stimuli based on an algorithm optimizing for what will grab our attention best. It doesn't matter if it has value, or even if it can hold our attention, because there's always some new novelty in the pipeline.
Long-form writing ask us to choose a subject and then focus deeply and deliberately on it. It's more demanding and more rewarding.
You can have passive experiences via either medium. TikTok is really optimized for that shallow level of engagement though and books trend in the opposite direction.
I will say that it is different to me, but perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books.
To me, I do not reminisce or think about tiktoks / instagram posts having an impact on my life or how I think or how I interact with others. Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read. I kind of know this, as I'm thinking about books I read in highschool over 20 years ago at the moment.
I suppose they give me things to think about beyond the moment I'm reading them, they make me feel things I otherwise wouldn't etc. It's possible for these things in media like movies, and even tiktok too I would imagine.
The reverse is also possible for books to be junk that you read and enjoy in the moment but soon forget.
But I also think the algorithm / profit motive behind tiktok and social media in general tends to mean that it's more likely to be junk, and it's not the person's fault who gets pulled into that. They're brutally effective skinner boxes, imo. Just like some games (mmos and now live service for even shooters).
There's something missing in the current media landscape that the old one did have, which was finality. You read a book, it's over. Similar with older movies, but now we have a bit of the "keep up with the starwars or marvel" thingy which is a bit live service like if you think about it. A constant desire to make folks feel like they have to keep up. Yeah things had sequels before, so I'm probably just waxing nostalgic here.
I'm rambling, sorry, just wanted to share some of my current thoughts.
I'm sure if tiktok didn't exist, these folks would be putting on 24/7 soap operas instead. The desire for a background thing to passively consume has likely always existed. Be it radio, whatever.
The algorithm does seem to be ruthless these days though, god if I know what I mean by that.
> perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books
> Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read
Exactly what I was thinking. I can still tell you about the first novel I read, first trilogy, favorite books, least favorite, and also each of those per genre. I can tell you what was going on in my life at the time.
The only thing I can say about social media posts are that I have a handful of vague memories of times when someone I knew or knew of would post something that made me realize they had a side I didn’t know of, and not in a good way.
I’m reminded of a quote I read recently, paraphrased: social media connects limbic systems, not prefrontal cortexes. I might take issue with the pure dichotomous nature of that statement, but I think it holds generally.
A book sticks with you, but reels phase through you like light through a window. Once the book is finished, your mind races with ideas about the book; good or bad.
Instagram reels leave you with nothing. Once the next reel passes, the previous one is flushed down the memory, as if these last 28 seconds were nothingness.
While the humble reel only demands a vague trance-like state and your eyes turned to the phone, the books needs your full attention and mental capacity to be enjoyed completely.
Note that none of this is specific to books. Shows, movies, (solo) games. They're all about something. The point of instagram reel is being about nothing at all. Watching it to fill your head with void. A silent, temporary death. "Psychological obliteration" is particularly apt here.
It's a different sort of 'passive'. There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network which 'lights up' in very different ways, depending on what you do, and how. One could argue that is to be expected, because different regions of the brain are exercised. But that's not all of it. Regarding exercise, think of 'Use it, or lose it'. It's mostly the imagination which is exercised while reading. If it isn't, it shrivels.
I wouldn’t consider reading as a passive consumption. You have to 1. Lead and follow a tempo, essentially moving your eyes at the speed of you thought 2. Using imagination to associate what you read with other knowledges.
TV and ticktock don’t need 1. You can interact with a remote or you scrolling-thumb but interaction is not required to consume.
2. Isn’t a necessity neither but people do use TV, ticktock or music to "empty their mind" by thinking to nothing else but the consumption flow. You can do that with reading, but that’s not an experience people usually like and they come back to the place their mind left.
Number two but in book form is "beach reads" which can include your favorite trash romance or the latest "dad book" Vince Flynn / Clive Cussler / Tom Clancy thing. And given the huge popularity of the two genres folks are reaching for books to turn off plenty.
>But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
Cervantes, 1605:
>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...
This is essentially Neil Postman's argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death [0]. The basic idea is that the medium matters, and different media are better suited to different types of messages and discourse. This is why I rail against social media--in particular things like Twitter/X and Bluesky, because their basic structure leads to poor communication outcomes.
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.
I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.
Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.
But then you have people like my one friend, who is scrolling non-stop literally from waking to sleep. It's hard to even have a 3 sentence conversation as he's constantly elsewhere.
pretty optimistic review of the power of the individual/mind contra the really fine-tuned algorithms of engagement. the hook is the “filling bits of (idle) time.” the accounting when all the filling of bits of time is done seems to add up to a huge sum. the extra time definitely would have been borrowed (read: stolen) from somewhere.
I agree that algorithmic feeds and even just having endless distractions in a hip pocket are terribly unhealthy. I thinks its wise to be very mindful with both and that they can quietly steal from other experiences that one might prefer in hindsight.
But I don't have a way to square that perspective with what the original commenter suggested about "psychological obliteration" and "addiction akin to gambling or heroin"
People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions. They're clearly not consuming or addictive in the same way as those others things, where people often make explicit wantonly destructive choices in service to their addiction.
And realistically, that they're a different kind of risk with a different kind of impact may make them even more dangerous from a health-of-society perspective, because we don't have great cultural insight or hygeine practices to deal with them. If we want to change that, we need to recognize that they don't represent the same danger we're used to.
So I'm not dismissing that they're bad. I'm just dismissing the original commenters' deeply strained and distracting characterization.
> People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions
If someone is paying, the transaction, by construction reinforces the psychological boundaries that obliteration eliminates. So I think not paying is part of it, just like addicts ignore the (perhaps partially non monetary) price of their behavior.
I think this is a very salient point, namely the danger of passive consumption is the losing the sense of oneself. We can be become so absorbed by the objects of our attention that we forget ourselves and this has very real consequences both on of physiology but also our psychology. So part of the solution is to "remember yourself" while you're consuming or directing your attention towards any object, so you are the subject and you are attending to an object. The last piece of the puzzle is that both you, the subject, and the object of your attention are located in space, so location/context is the third essential aspect of the experience to internalize for proper harmony, as far as I understand it.
I didn't see Andy Farnell's "Digital Self-Defense" mentioned, but I think it's relevant here -- analogous to how one should be cognizant of personal safety when navigating a city (or even while crossing a busy intersection).
Nay, even commenting is often pointless. HN likes to overly articulate drivel more often than not. Indeed, even this very comment is pointless, because what does it really add but another section in another chain of pointless drivel? Socializing is human. Any and all communication platforms like forums, or even Twitter, work to capitalize on the needless want to contribute something. Which is often unnecessary. I'd argue that lurking is often the smarter choice.
Not that books are exempt from the same problem. Many of them are pointless or suck too, but that's just part of living in a flawed world.
At least to me, reading is much more an "active" task. It takes effort to read that extra paragraph. My eyes are closing or wandering around. My hands are tempted to close the book and do something else, even if it's a book I like!
It's (quite ironically!) an artifact of the social media culture itself: the shift towards increasingly unmoored, extreme language, disproportionate to whatever thing it's in response to. The effect of echo chambers both winding people up in agitation spirals, while tuning out influences that'd tend to tamp down the intensity.
"I wasted a few hours watching stupid videos and feel regretful about that" != "YouTube obliterated my soul!"
Eh, sorry if this wasn't clear, but obliteration is intended to have a specific meaning in my post. I'll clarify here.
Obliteration is like when "you," your conception of "your self" as an entity in the world ceases to exist. Like your internal thoughts turning off, minutes turning into hours, lack of awareness of your surroundings. If you've ever been to a casino or seen someone with a bad drinking problem, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Alternately (!), if you've ever seen someone in a pro tennis match, grandmaster chess tournament, (or as other commenters are rightly pointing out -- reading a really good book!) it's kinda like that too.
However, those productive activities are different for the soul in a way that I have trouble articulating.
I emphatically am not intending it as just like "thing that's really really bad."
I don't think it's unmoored or disproportionate at all, actually. Look at someone who is really locked in on one of these apps. Or do a search for social media addiction, that stuff really does wreck people's lives and is bad for the soul. A wide body of psychological research supports this. I am sharing what I have noticed and trying to understand what the causal mechanism is.
I think the delivery might be sensational but I agree with the sentiment. Especially since you acknowledge that it isn't purely harmful. Normally I don't watch short form video but occasionally I do and I do feel it's a somewhat different state of mind. I would be worried about myself if I found it happening often.
I think it’s pretty clear the GP (and others) believe this is pseudopsychology bunk supported by neither any available evidence nor by professionals in the field.
It takes 1,000x less time and energy to come up with a pet theory de novo and sans any evidence than it takes to debunk. Without backing evidence provided for an idea, it should be as easy to dismiss out of hand as it was to create it in the first place.
Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
Both composing text and reading map closely to thinking.
The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).
For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.
The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it?
Simple but effective solution:
1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.
2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "simple":
- News reporting is straightforward insofar as requiring a code. Opinion about news is where it gets messy - if someone has a TV or radio show where they render their opinions or thoughts about news events, that's first amendment territory.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "effective":
- Journalism probably must be scalably funded to scalably exist. We see currently that people are not willing to do that and that opinion heads pervade the "news and information" space. So requiring compliance to a code in order to profit off of journalism doesn't work for the same reason minimum wage doesn't really work - people can just choose not to interact with code-compliant journalism much like companies can just not hire people.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates both the above assertions "simple" and "effective" at once.
- You cannot separate any board of X from political interests, which are much more important if commercial interests are explicilty separated from X.
> Or democracy will perish eventually.
None of the above counters or invalidates this statement.
(Although the response is not gibberish, I can´t feel certain that I reply to a chatgpt response (?))
You take it too static. If you are waiting for the type-safe, leak free hammered approach, you will achieve nothing.
I want you to take this approach to get you going in the right direction.
Opinion pieces
- Opinion pieces are indeed a way where editorial boards go cheap, outsourcing meta thinking to external entities/influence. Those editorial boards going of the rails there is not an act of nature, but like in the case of the NYT a consequence of commercial ownership. As part of the code any opinion piece should be clearly marked as such, as well as the interests of the author.
Journalism probably must be scalabe
There is no need for scalable mega media corporations. In countries with 1) public news organizations[*] and 2) required independent editorial boards, commercial titles are not as going overboard as in the US.
You cannot separate any board of X from political interests
You can, but you can never be absolute 100% perfect.
A peculiar, mindset has been programmed that ethics in society is defined in what what terms the lawyer wrote. A good society is all about what you collectively allow or disallow, no scheme, no law can perfectly defeat all bad actors all the time.
The social part of "society" is an activity. If you as normal people don't show up, then it will be a Murdoch party.
From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.
I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern times.
Naively, I would think the same. But in the first part of AOTD, Neil Postman argues pretty convincingly that America in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most literate, bookish society on Earth and in the later parts of the book that that heritage was lost with the invention of the telegraph, radio, and later TV.
In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made us dumber in a real sense.
They were still speaking of subset of americans. One should look up the literacy rates of poor white or black americans of the time to get a better understanding of where the headspace of the average person might have been. There is a reason why politicians had to campaign by actually visiting and orally presenting their positions.
Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?
I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
You can stop pretending that the contents of the news-show has any relation to reality.
IMO, the entire problem comes from this one lie. But you see... a lot of people wants this propaganda machine.
Also, nowadays you can stream deep journalism that people can adjust to their time availability. We usually call those "documentaries". Most of the stuff that carries that name is psychotic garbage too, but informative ones do exist.
Probably not, as long as we continue the requirement that all information conveyed to the public must be done in a way that is maximally profitable to the producer. As long as information must be profitable, it will inevitably cease to be information and turn into entertainment soon enough. When was the last time you saw a TV Station that wasn't majority ads?
At the same time its not like the harder information isn’t available. One can find factual news and pieces of information. This is what the policy wonks who craft policy that the pr wonks spin into soundbites have to be able to find and read to understand the world after all.
Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News isn’t to be informed for most people. It is for entertainment like any other fodder content shoehorned into some free minutes of your day. And that’s ok because as long as some technical people need to actually get things done, there is good information and data out there for you to actually learn about the world. It just will be in some dry .gov website or some other source perhaps instead of distilled down to a 2 min article written to a 6th grade reading level with a catchy headline on cnn.com, but thats OK. You will learn to appreciate the dryness and technical language.
I will say though we shouldn't underestimate habitual inertia in all things. My dad will probably watch Cable news till he dies. There's arguably far more interesting and entertaining things on the internet, that i have showed him to access and explore on his laptop, that he uses frequently. But his main source of news appears to be Cable still, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna change.
Then there was the great culling of newspapers and magazines. It was probably the last thing longer than a paragraph that my dad actually read consistently. They mostly went online, stopped being delivered and he was forced off of the reading experience. Sure, you can seek things like that out but it was serendipitous, they got less funding, raises prices, fox continued to foxify, i don't know that he's really read anything since! I, myself, am trying with some difficulty to begin reading more. I need the concentration back
My 2 cents:
1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.'
More here
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a...
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine.
-Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities.
-Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
The COVID school closures and remote learning years will prove to be the biggest negative educational/developmental impact on a generation that we've seen in a long time.
And it disproportionately hit the poorest in society the most. My kid had his own room to work in, his own computer to work on, and WFH parents to help him out. He was not, massively, negatively impacted.
In my work, I was in touch with families with multiple children at home, no computers, maybe one or two phones, and no broadband connection. The kids, for all intents and purposes, just lost two years of education.
>I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?
In "Slouching Towards Utopia" there's a lot of emphasis on "communities of practice". I think HN is a great example for software people. I wonder if the hollowing out of print media begins a vicious cycle where the community of practice also decays. People leave the industry, connections don't persist across jobs, fewer events, fewer new people coming in and getting excited, etc...
First lack of budget to keep them there full time, then they'll re-skill and change industries due to lack of job opportunities. Sooner or later they won't be able to easily go back, because tools, styles, and publisher and reader tastes change, as well
If you spend a decade or three learning and perfecting your trade, and spend a decade away from it without practicing, you'll be rusty (at best) regardless of what the job actually is
This fuels everything from shipbuilding to the military industrial complex - you practice and improve by constantly doing and refining, and your nation can end up a world-leader in designing microprocessors or building supersonic fighters
That comment takes all facts and context out of the discussion and does not inform. Do you know what Title 1 is? 504? IDEA? I'm not going to defend garbage laws like No Child Left Behind, mind you, ask any teacher how terrible that law is. But both my kids, one autistic, one ADHD, have heavily depended on section 504 for their education. As for any decline in education, I would look instead at the anti-intellectual so-called 'family values' that have been on the rise since 1980.
Are demographics controlled for here? We know the proportion of foreign born has been increasing since the 70s, are these results attempting to remove the effect of non-native speakers?
Its probably more useful to distinguish between foreign educated vs born here.
Interestingly the last stats I remember seeing about ESL students is they tend to out-perform english students in a number of subjects depending on the age group, so factoring them out might lower the overall stats and show an even worse trend among native born english speaking American students.
The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of weighty tomes..
Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks. Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10 or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least between the two.
I understand what you mean about spatial understanding, and personally do love the the comforting reference value of having actual books on your shelves and being able to go back to specific parts of them no matter what.
However, it's not hard to compensate for this with digital books, through bookmarking options, copy-pasting specific parts and storing them elsewhere (with tiny notes on page number and book title) and other options.
I keep all of my own digital books DRM-stripped in my own device folders and back those up too. This to at least partly replicate the possession security that physical books give. I also absolutely never trust storing large collections of them on something as absurdly untrustworthy as, for example, "Kindle on Demand", which is on-demand right until your access demand arbitrarily gets ignored no matter how much money you spent on what were supposedly owned purchases.
This, also writing on the page for notes or underlining for curiosities are for me just easier to do in a paper book then on a e-reader.
But that's just me being stuck in my ways. So and I see the use of digital versions as well.
Specially as a lot of my technical books now often coming with a digital copy! It's best of both worlds.
Yeah, I had to look closely as well to figure out what this was saying. The core reasoning seems to be this one sentence: "Printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of the algorithm since tinkering with code can’t delete their contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive."
But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can read offline to keep someone over the network from tampering with contents. You can advocate for and obtain DRM-free experiences so tampering is easier to spot. You can make many copies of the bits for yourself, leaning into one of software's great strengths. So I think there are many ways to resist the "neon god" here. But we do each of us have to think for ourselves about the consequences of our choices.
Piratebay has always been a poor source for most books. Another site that gets much less attention than zlibrary is as far as I'm concerned an incredible source of books. libgen.
But the tome's weight is borne up by the table, whereas throwing any light in your face will affect your eyes. Possibly dawn and twilight gazing are quite beneficial.
In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'"
Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has always been so, or worse.
It's basically constant that many people will fearmonger and some will embrace new technology. I think this is basically independent of the actual merits and drawbacks of the given technology. Regardless of these strange asymptotes, I would say technology has been advancing from less benefit/risk to more in time, and so we will get closer to the fearmongerers being right. I suppose it could mean that we harness the benefits and waive the risks, but in practice it seems unlikely.
It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group
Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
- things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job"
- people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be true.
> things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable
"Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here.
Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value.
FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc.
Did they ever speak out against torture, or illegal war? How much? Did they ever go into the long term advantages of Jill Stein's economic plans; or Bernie's? How much?
The fact that we spent over $8 trillion in a murderous money laundering scheme should have been front page news every day for years. The costs of our incredible and historic inequality are rarely discussed, and if they are, it's in the most limp manner imaginable. The opportunity cost of all this fuckery, from a rational economic perspective, is mind blowing.
The Overton Window is now looking onto bipartisan genocide, after decades of bipartisan illegal war and an extreme agenda of Islamophobia.
> people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases
People like Musk buy news sources to spread their biases. Same for Murdoch, Turner, Bezos, etc.
I think the reason why the FT, among others, don't spend much space on human rights issues is because they are inherently transactional publications in nature. You have to pay to subscribe, and those who do expect something in return - I suspect that this is usually a sense of being 'in the know' on business matters. Obviously knowledge of Jill Stein's manifesto is not going to make its readers any money in the foreseeable future.
I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe. Compare this to the tabloids, which don't charge for online access and make money by peddling particular business or political interests - mostly shady business, I think most would agree. I'd therefore trust FT on the facts, albeit probably not for wide coverage.
> I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe
No ulterior motive? I really don't know about that.
They're better than most, because they generally tell the truth - a shockingly low bar - but it's a specific type of truth, as seen from a specific and very narrow window, from a deliberate vantage point.
Always viewing the world from that specific window belies a motive, conscious or not, to maintain a highly destructive status quo. They are not seeing the forest for the trees, while writing factual and detailed reports on the least consequential tree bark facts.
Which is fine, if tree bark facts are your bag, I guess - but I'm more concerned about the rapidly deteriorating forest.
> I'm having a hard time understanding what your complaint is.
That the word reliable was being used to describe the FT.
'Reliable' within a certain narrow context for the people trashing our potential (ie, the capital class)? Yes.
'Reliable' within a broader context, where we get to the root causes of our catastrophic inequality, our over extraction of resources, our environmental destruction, our war mongering leaders, etc? Also yes; but in precisely the wrong way. They can be relied on to support whatever makes the yacht class more money in the next few quarters.
This matters because corporate media has been truly complicit in much of our impending doom/s; the FT being far from an exception.
Handy tip: If someone's point seems very obvious, like where bears shit, it's usually worth reading the comment again to see if you've missed something. Ie in this case, the entire second half of my comment.
> 'Reliable' within a broader context, where we get to the root causes of our catastrophic inequality, our over extraction of resources, our environmental destruction, our war mongering leaders, etc? Also yes; but in precisely the wrong way. They can be relied on to support whatever makes the yacht class more money in the next few quarters.
They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else. Something being important doesn't mean it should be written about everywhere.
> They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else.
Financial news from a specific and narrow viewpoint. There are others.
This is the third time I've said it now. It would be nice to know where the confusion is coming from. Is it simply that many people can't imagine any alternate view of finance news, other than that sold by FT?
What if, back in the slavery days, a newspaper reported solely from the perspective of slaveholders, never slaves. They only printed 'facts' - how much a slave could be expected to depreciate by age, which regions produced the hardest working slaves, etc.
Would this be a 'reliable' paper? Would it just be 'financial news'? Would it simply be a 'premier capitalist publication publishing facts capitalists find useful'? Well, yes, in a way.
And that's exactly what financial newspapers back then did. They traded in dry, money making facts - in support of a deeply exploitative and unsustainable system. Always from one particular perspective - the slaveholder's; that of the ownership class.
'Reliable' isn't a word I would have chosen to describe them.
In more modern times, FT takes huge ad money from fossil fuel companies, cheer-leads the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, has never met a neoliberal/neocon since that they didn't love; and takes the view of the 0.1% 99.9% of the time. Almost completely heedless of the permanent damage that is being done to all life on Earth as a result, except as a side note in an article about how apocalypse might affect your portfolio.
Will any of this sink in? Can you change your mind, or at least the subject? Let's see.
Part of it is a sort of pascals wager being done, where it becomes rational and logical to play this game as it is for yourself however unsavory, because the incentives for playing it as such are high enough where people will always do it. Altruism towards the collective species fundamentally takes a backseat for individual and kin survival. There are plenty of species where the
mother will even eat any offspring who don’t flee them after birth soon enough because the incentives for the mother even out way that small affordance of altruism to kin. Biology is about entropy not emotions at the end of the day.
Yes, the ultra wealthy have different priorities to what I would call important. The yachts, deregulation, tacit (or not) support for torture, illegal wars, pollution, private jets, ostentatious displays of conspicuous and pointless wealth, etc, leave that in no doubt.
Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow? Like Zorg's little speech [0] about the benefits of destruction (the broken window fallacy)?
> It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
You said they are dodging 'genuine understanding'.
I am saying you aren't the final word on what 'genuine understanding of everything most important' is.
In other words - you are using lots of words to say 'I want others to do more of the stuff I want them to do and less of the stuff they are doing because the stuff I want them to do is obviously good and the stuff they are doing is obviously less good'.
Thing is, almost everyone thinks this. Given that almost everyone already thinks this way and the world isn't what you want it to be, maybe something about such a worldview is off. Or maybe we just need more of people like you in positions of power and you'll fix it :) Where have I heard that one before?
So anyone who uses the phrase "genuine understanding" is secretly a wannabe power-hungry authoritarian? Dunno about that one bud.
And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption, or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal gain, that's not obviously perverse to you; it's just one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
Well, pick your prophet; pick your genius; they all say the same thing:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
- Jesus.
"By his craving for riches the foolish man slays himself, as if he were slaying others."
- Buddha
"The mutual rivalry for piling up of worldly things diverts you, until you visit the graves."
- The Qur'an
"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
- Socrates
"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
- Seneca
"The more you have, the more you want. The more you have, the less you are."
- Tolstoy
"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
- Einstein
"Wealth is like seawater: the more you drink, the thirstier you become."
- Schopenhauer
"A small terrace by the mountain stream, living at ease, free from the burdens of the world — this is better than the glory of an emperor."
- Zhuangzi
Etc, etc, etc.
Some people, really, truly, have a genuine understanding of this concept. And many, probably most incredibly wealthy people, with every possible opportunity, can't grasp it for the life of them. That's not really "my opinion"; it's the opinion of anyone worth listening to.
>And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption, or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal gain, that's not obviously perverse to you; it's just one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
Pretty much, yes.
Yesterdays vapid conspicuous consumption is tomorrows minimum living standard.
Three meals a day every day forever?
Even medieval kings had to go on a diet when famine struck.
> Yesterdays vapid conspicuous consumption is tomorrows minimum living standard.
The way of life of our billionaires is threatening all life on the planet, particularly the poorest [0]. There might not be a living standard if we don't fix this issue.
It isn't the billionaires emitting that, it is all the factories they own that produce products for the middle class. If the middle class didn't consume those then they wouldn't have been made and the pollution wouldn't be there.
Billionaires emit a bit more, but not that much more.
Note the very disingeneous comment here:
> tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments
"Private jets" and "polluting investments" were in the same sentence as if they were in the same ballpark, but its the investments that count for almost everything and they would be polluting regardless if the billionaires owned them or not.
> Oxfam found that, on average, 50 of the world’s richest billionaires took 184 flights in a single year, spending 425 hours in the air —producing as much carbon as the average person would in 300 years. In the same period, their yachts emitted as much carbon as the average person would in 860 years.
That's not "a bit more". That's insane.
And there's absolutely nothing disingenuous about it, because the article clearly states:
> the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.
> Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
... I don't know why this isn't convincing to you, but it's not Oxfam's fault.
If course what you're saying can be taking to absurdity too. Take the paradox of intolerance, if we let the intolerant have power they will wipe out anyone they don't like, hence why we have laws against things like murder.
It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant:
> Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
- Alanis Obomsawin
This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years.
Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
It's a metaphor (though in many parts of the world it's a simple fact); but yeah, it could be global some day. I wouldn't put it past us. We've lost countless species already.
We've been abysmal to trees. If we were to keep losing forest at our current global rate we'd lose the last tree in 400-800 years (though tbf this is decelerating right now).
New England has more tree cover than 200 years ago - great. Europe too. Is 200 years ago a good reference point though? Isn't that when we chopped like 80% of our forests down for industrialization?
Anyway, so the centers of Empire are green(ish). How's the Amazon doing though? How's South-East Asia? Central Africa?
And our new forests - are they old growth and diverse, or monoculture Sitka spruce? Organic, or doused with glyphosate?
And then there's the climate, which we are fucking up faster than scientists predicted... Can trees adapt in time? ... Would trees survive nuclear holocaust?
I'm not saying Bladerunner was a documentary. But we're on course for catastrophe, no doubt about it; and the relentless pursuit of ever more capital via externalized costs is why.
>Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
Lets assume all people when given the opportunity will do what is in their own best interests first.
The less power you have, the more working with others is in your own best interest.
The more wealth you have, the more power you have and the less you _need_ to work with others to achieve what you want or need, so you have an increased ability to weigh what is best for you vs what is best for everyone.
At some point the wealth/power split is so much that you can effectively stop caring about what everyone else wants and pursue what you want and what benefits you.
So while they may have better information, they aren't incentivized to decisions that are less harmful to everyone.
> Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
All of those can be leveraged for profit if one is cynical and self-serving enough. Most of 'them' that fall into these categories know to some degree the actions they take are harmful to others, and frankly they don't care. Either in their own self-interest, or deluded interests of whatever group they identify with.
You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on?
I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context.
Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.
On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.
I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.
They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.
I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.
People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
Any extreme is, by definition, unusual. You don’t need to be a billionaire (which is what the articule you linked to focus on) to be considered powerful or wealthy.
Tellingly, that articles notes that:
> The proportion of those in the list who grew up poor or had little wealth remained constant at roughly 20 percent throughout the same period.
Which suggests that inheriting power and money does make a difference in your chance of success. They continue:
> Most individuals on the Forbes 400 list did not inherit the family business but rather made their own fortune.
But one does not follow from the other. Inheriting a business is not the only way to have a leg up. If you’re well off you have the opportunity to risk going into some venture on your own and fail, because you have a safety net. Furthermore, your affluent family can and probably will make a difference in your business. I’m reminded of a piece of news a while back where a couple of rich kids were bragging they made their company successful “from scratch” but upon further inspection into it was revealed their customers were rich friends of their parents.
The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
You know you’ve gone off the deep end when you call Musk an “entrepreneur” in quotes instead of what he is - a regular, if excellent, entrepreneur.
Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of prominence from there.
That’s fundamentally different from inheriting power even if you’re a dunce as kings once did.
No, he's not, he's a douche born into criminal wealth that organisations he ends up in needs to protect themselves from.
Today he's also a fascist grifter who's entered into politics. For some reason usians don't revolt when their political system elects rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right, so I'm hoping it'll turn into something like a kingdom that they find it in themselves to overturn.
Hard to believe now, but for quite a long time he focused on visionary technology, was an exceptional business man, an inspiring builder and leader of his organizations.He also demonstrated other unusual skills in ways people forget, never noticed, or sneer at ignorantly. Successfully navigating the national red tape for both Tesla and SpaceX, in industries with extremely entrenched regulatory captivating incumbents, demonstrated just one of many non-obvious skills.
Today?
He incessantly spews anti-inspirational anti-rational anti-social and anti-business diarrhea to an alarming and epic degree. He drives Twitter/X’s business logic like a drunk going the wrong way on a highway, seemingly intent on hitting every guardrail he can find.
So far SpaceX and perhaps to a lesser degree Tesla are getting by on the deep talent he gathered in better times.
No, most of the reporting from "his organizations" is about how they defend themselves against him and blow the whistle about security concerns, plus the union busting and wage theft and so on. Plus the story about how Thiel kicked him out to save PayPal.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are military labs behind plausible deniability, dual-use aprons. Hence they're run to a larger extent by people who aren't him and he works like a neat distraction for outsiders.
Much like Thiel he doesn't show any "deep talent". That's something other people are bringing to the organisations they're part of.
Dramatic exits after successful acquisitions are common. You have to earn “failures” like that.
That created SpaceX’s seed capital.
(You can’t have it both ways. If he had convinced the US to bankroll him, that would have been serious business acumen.)
Minor success on hard problems, with a shoe string budget, and an attractive business plan (vertical integration, fast-failure iteration, reusability) got investment capital flowing.
More successes, more capital.
Result: They changed the economics of space launches & save money for all their customers, including NASA & the military.
No resemblance to nepo operations or results. See Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
$ billions of dollars burn with each SLS launch. Massive delays & cost plus overruns. For now.
Thiel put him aside before the IPO, which was before Ebay bought them.
There's been a lot of reporting about how SpaceX is keeping Musk's influence at a minimum. If you go looking you'll also find video from interviews with Musk in that role where he isn't talking from a script and comes across as a clueless high schooler.
Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
I don’t like one-sided trolls who are insecure that some other people are exceptional?
Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
—
More productively:
I don’t have an axe to grind either way, other than giving credit where it is due, and vice versa.
My original comment reflected both.
He has done some truly incredible work. He earned his success.
Lately, he is a mess with completely different priorities.
I imagine many employees in all his companies are happier when he is not around these days. And would be happy if he stopped posting opinions, given the downstream impact to their brands.
> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
I responded to your pointless, inaccurate and rude conjecture with an equally pointless, rude, and what I assumed was an equally inaccurate conjecture to suggest that perhaps we keep our conversation substantive.
If the sense in that still isn’t clear, you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
> What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
I don’t know how “success” could be any more evident.
But if you believe you see shortcuts that were taken, then perhaps take your insight and do something comparable? Good luck!
We've seen an explosion in time spent looking at second-hand information online in recent decades - social media & news. I think a healthier way is to get information direct from the source, and from going and doing things.
I think some people responded to the deluge of slop by clutching out their connection to reality and relying solely on a couple of third parties for their worldview.
There's no point in arguing with someone who looks at Elon Musk and cannot see success because they can only look at him through a thick lens of ideology and tribalism. Five, ten years ago, some these same people probably thought he was in their tribe and idolized him then. Ten years ago, they probably liked Trump and his shows too.
I think it's the other way around. My interlocutor above has a "thick lens of ideology and tribalism".
This is why they're being very unspecific and arguing like a child from a position of conviction, "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I've never had a keen eye to people that ride on the labour of other people and take credit for their work. Gossip magazines just don't work on me, and I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
> My interlocutor above has a "thick lens of ideology and tribalism".
This is why they're being very unspecific and arguing like a child from a position of conviction, "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
There you go again, making up my back story despite having no idea who I am.
It is rude, but worse than that, a waste of words.
I would insert another whimsical parody, referring back to you, but that somehow threw you last time.
So I will just repeat:
> Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
> you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
--
It isn't controversial, nor should it require a complex justification to say with some confidence, that the richest person on the planet has been "successful". Widely documented synonym: "prosperous", i.e. achieving great wealth.
>> "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I will be more precise and less rhetorical: based on the meanings of the words "successful", "prosperous" and "richest person on the planet" it is as close to a tautology as informal human language allows.
--
> I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
"Progressive" doesn't mean charitable.
As has been pointed out to you already, reading and using words consistent with their widely documented meanings will help you communicate better, and communicate something coherent, beyond simply projecting strong dislike and distrust of Musk.
But, I am sympathetic to that viewpoint as was evident from my first comment.
Musk has not lived up to values he previously espoused. And he routinely demonstrates deep hypocrisy relative to principles he claims to value today.
It's a very minor thing in the big picture to be born into a 3rd world country like South Africa's top 1%.
> criminal wealth
His dad likely had some dodgy dealings, but there's every indication that he made the bulk of his money legally. Anyway, how does that reflect on Musk? Did we go back to "sins of the fathers"?
> organisations he ends up in needs to protect themselves from.
Ah yes, it's pure coincidence that so many of these organizations go on to absolutely kick ass. Let's check in on the EV situation at, say, GM or BMW in an alternate universe without Tesla. Or on the progress at ULA or Blue Origin.
> fascist
I don't think you understand what that word means. A key part of fascism is unlimited government control - the exact opposite of what he wants.
> grifter
He sells stuff? I guess that's bad in your eyes?
> who's entered into politics
How very dare he!?
> rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right,
Apartheid was a crime. SA occupying and running mining operations in other countries was criminal. Profiting from it means you're accumulating criminal wealth.
Mistaking first-mover advantage and access to extreme amounts of funding for "kick ass" is quite weird.
No, that's not a characteristic of fascism. He's impressed by and promotes nazis, maintains his wealth through corporativism, and so on.
No, it's that he makes wild promises, takes money and then don't deliver on them that makes him a grifter.
Just going to drill into a couple of aspects of your rant.
First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his support of Trump and DOGE, we can conclude that he's the opposite of a fascist and wants to reduce the state. He's much more Millei than Mussolini. This is so elementary I'm a little confused as to why I have to spell it out.
Here's some more homework for you: [1]. Words like Nazi and Fascist and Communist have meanings. If we want to have a civilized society, we must first respect the meanings of words so that we can have a conversation.
Second: name a Nazi that Musk likes. Before you say Trump, here's Trump's Fine People speech. Watch the whole thing, then tell me he's a Nazi. Then also keep in mind the massive "Trump calls Nazis Fine People" hoax the media has been banging on about ever since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKbFA7HW-U
Third, Musk is known for making wild promises, many of which are as yet undone. Nobody would care who he is if that was all there is to him. But some of his wild promises are real and part of everyday life.
Fourth, if you think he wins due to extreme funding, go read the stories of Zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. All of the above teetered on the brink of nonexistence due to being bootstrapped by Musk who was then strapped for cash.
Fascism is a phase under capitalism where ideology breaks down and the people in power are split between going into hiding and panicked power grabs through any means available. Typically it involves ultra-nationalists taking formal political power and increasing the capitalist totalitarian impulse.
The state is much, much more "all-embracing" today than what Mussolini could ever have imagined, and has been for a long time, decades.
Musk wants a more total influence on the world, he doesn't want anyone to be able to say something negative about him, for example. He wants to eradicate large swathes of people, explicitly by making it impossible to talk about them and in practice it will likely boil down to the destruction of their bodies once that fails.
You're obviously sympathetic to this neo-fascist movement. Let's hope you'll manage to leave, because by now it looks like the resistance to it has to get violent.
I'll consider setting up a terrarium but it'll take a month or two to get started. Where I live there is no grass outdoors at this time of year but I can probably find Festuca rubra seeds in the back of certain stores.
Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
> you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh"
But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so that putting the burden on the individual is made manageable.
To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
The individual solution is insufficient in this case. Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the level of population statistics, it means there's a systemic cause that's stronger than most people's willpower.
Society is flush with lots of drugs tobacco, alcohol, sugar, junk food, social media, reels... At society level, better laws and campaigns may work best but at individual level you'll get best ROI by focusing efforts on disciplining yourself and your family and friends.
You would have a better main point when you started to question how this accident could happen:
Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that by accident does everything to not talk about subjects that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive, emotionial pulp of no relevance.
The problem is: we are naturally attracted to junk that tickles are emotional belief systems, for example some ideas we have about immigrants. It takes active THINKING to go against your gut feeling.
How do you do that when you
1. were never taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest held memes
2. were brainwashed by endless affirmation via infotainment
3. are living in an infotainment environment were half of your countrymen believe things like "the election was stolen"?
You are proposing to bank on someone already deeply burdened by debt.
I can't engage with this unless I talk politics... and my views (based on calling spades spades) wont be popular with anyone on any side ;). So will leave it there and say yes it is unfortunate.
r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
I read the sentence a couple of times to try to figure out what the phrase “ephemeral gauze” was intended to convey but failed to make sense of it. So, I figured that “gaze” may have been the intended word, i.e., readers pay particular attention to text while they’re in the process of reading it (gaze) but that it’s quickly forgotten when they move on to the next unrelated thing they see on the Internet (ephemerality).
I’m only familiar with gauze in the context of first-aid kits and other medical usage so I’d appreciate hearing your interpretation of “ephemeral gauze”.
As opposed to the solid materiality of books, the "material" of the internet is an "ephemeral gauze", a thin and shifting fabric (a mesh, literally a web) on which it would be impossible to apply ink, to hold rigid, etc.
This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue.
I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain.
Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'.
When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.
The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to control their position. It has always been useful to control the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy us like music notes completing a chord progression. Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain compatibility. It just exists.
I recently read Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf, which makes many similar arguments, and found myself agreeing with this. I've been finding it harder and harder to lose myself in a book, to finish books, to read as I used to read. It's as if the lens through which I view reading and books has shifted - from a way to be thrust into another world, to something to be browsed in short, easy-to-read snippets, like social media but with things like covers and jackets and spines.
I'd also like to note that, while the printed book is certainly not perfect at staying through the ages - something like stone tablets are probably best for that - it's a lot more reliable than online things. Maybe that'll change, but for now, tech companies go out of business a lot more frequently than floods or fires or other disasters strike the average house. And while, if Simon and Schuster go out of business, that doesn't do a thing to the books you have purchased from them, if Amazon goes out of business, there's no guarantee any of your Kindle will be readable anymore.
I envision that meme of having large bookshelves filled with books, something I could show off to friends as a proof that there is still plenty to be found in books, that I've found valuable in books. That on some days I might take the time to sit down, brew some tea or something, and read a book.
>The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
The content committed to print needs to be worth it. I'm a fan of old-school sci-fi, the kind that asks how technology might enhance or undermine the human experience and how that might change, collapse, or raise society to new heights. Right now, the entire genre is in trough of unimaginative, vacuous current-day allegory. Most published work is entirely wrapped up in gender, sex, race, and labor politics. Everything is a stand-in for current political movements and figures, where the setting may as well be set-dressing. No curiosity, no prescience, no fundamental philosophical questioning.
My only reprieve is that sci-fi short story omnibuses contain maybe 20-30% true sci-fi that's exactly what I'm searching for. But buying a print novel off the shelf got to the point where it was wasting my money. And I can only re-read the classics so much.
Waiting for the "sci-fi was always current-day allegory!" sophomorists to flood the comments.
Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with: "Use decent software. And make copies."
And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?
I think the author would say that certain forms of content, like blogs, can be useful. I don't think they're completely eschewing digital reading, but instead pushing for far more print reading than is common now. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.
On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?
There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.
I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.
From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.
If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.
The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.
How come the only person who can ever seem to find conclusive research of this is Haidt? He really must head and shoulders above the lazy people in this field.
The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done
Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?
From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.
Sorry, I'll be using my lazy card here and give a concise answer, which you can extrapolate to find the answers to all of your questions.
PISA is a standardized test conducted by OECD for International Student Assessment. It's homepage is located at [0], alongside with datasets for all previous tests, and plethora of material.
So, you can download the data, look at the questions in any language you prefer, do your own analysis.
I'll just reiterate that, my personal experience mirrors the article. Extreme reliance of smart devices and technologies like conversational LLMs reduce the cognitive ability and deep thinking capacity tremendously. Children and people become interfaces to these devices they use. They just delegate all their thinking to these devices and live a much hollower life.
That's why I'm excited about the new batch of PineNote devices, e-readers running Linux with a custom GNOME theme and a passive stylus.
And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper. Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be a good enough compromise.
I exclusively use fountain pens and higher quality wirebound notebooks and notepads.
I number the notebook, and write the start date at first page. Then I number the pages as I go, and date every page.
When the notebook finishes, I remove the binding, scan it at 600DPI, store it as a PDF.
I'll be training a local Tesseract installation with my hand writing one day, but I'm not there. However, these notebooks saved the day more than once in their current form.
I'm using smart devices since Palm/Handspring era. Nothing can replace the paper for me, and I don't want to change my ways from now on. So this is the method I use for quite some time.
The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.
The point these focus-deprived children could accurately make is that our adult world is also about reward hacking and bullshit metrics. I’m old but I will tell you that everything I dislike that I see in the young is society’s fault. We did a truly terrible job of giving them a world in which to become better, rather than worse, people.
In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.
Kids see adults who don't read so why should they?
It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to become successful because nobody has the reading or concentration skills.
When I was a child I taught myself English by playing Planescape Torment.
My kids convinced me to try out a couple of those old final fantasy games from the 90s. As someone who studied Kabbalah I was intrigued by the fact that they named a character Sephiroth, although the character really had nothing to do with the name or concept. Anyway, I was already old so I didn’t have the same emotional connection (except when that girl was killed) because neither the writing nor the realism was at a level I hadn’t seen before. It definitely would have hit me hard at 13, though. Really hard.
Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.
The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.
Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
Funny that. I'm part of the generation really hit by FF7, and it was indeed quite memorable. I have plenty of memorable books read around the same era too. Also... I guess 'writing' in video games covers a lot more than just words.
Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
I often find the voice acting to be interminably slow and distracting and immersion breaking somehow. You are just waiting for the voice actor to slowly emote it all. I like how Morrowind did it when questing. Some flavor voice to set the mood and then great writing you read. Full voice acting for important parts and scenes.
I also see that in real world too. Too many times I wished a book existed to learn this or that and got an answer that you really need to hang out in multiple Discord groups to stay up-to-date. Newer generation apparently has less difficulty with that.
Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that theoretical education leaves open.
Yeah. I struggle to understand how podcasts and youtube are an efficient learning resource. They are slow, unstructured, and unsearchable. Whilst some software can ameliorate some of these (e.g. playback speed control), there's no analogue to the process of "can skip this paragraph, can skip this paragraph, let's search back for the definition of this term, let's cross-reference this term with this other text, let's see how many pages are left in this chapter...".
I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of everything having to be a video. I can read much-much faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow. So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10 minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to smash that bell because it helps me so much"...
Not only written text is a faster way to communicate information, it is so because it has much bigger context window:
"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.
"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.
In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.
There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.
It's not about being old fashioned. If you can't maintain focus to read a book, you're obviously not truly engaging with the material. How far are you going to get in a field, if you're reliant on having everything explained to you in simple terms.
Surely an article can cover a process end-to-end, just as a video can focus on only a critical part. Do you mean that the medium of video encourages the author to be more thorough?
That's fair. Someone commented in a different fork that videos are good for DIY jobs, and I totally agree. You want to see a person doing it live, so you can imitate their motions. I was thinking about learning something theoretical, like mathematics or history.
From my experience it is obviously the latter. Reading well, on paper or on screen, really requires you to put your complete attention to it. Audio (podcasts) and video (youtube) have the advantage of not requiring your complete attention. Everything else follows from that. Of course it can fit some people better. Just not where it matters.
There’s no such thing as multitasking. It is a literal illusion and is one big reason why people who can’t sit down and actually read a book (or lie down with eyes closed and LISTEN to a podcast/lecture) produce for themselves the illusion of understanding.
I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes.
When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.
Isn't it also because of a change in testing methods? It seems to me that multiple choice tests are more and more widespread. These can be gamed more easily, since you can often eliminate some of the choices based on knowledge unrelated to the correct answer.
For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test ever. Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe. Everything was problems, proofs, or essays.
Yes it was uncommon for me too. Our teacher in electronics back then did give us a multiple choice test because we asked so persistently. He wanted proof for why the option was chosen though. I thought he was just taking the piss but for one answer I could use proof by elimination and he accepted that. That proof was probably more work than just adding up a bunch of resistors, but it was also more fun :-)
I haven't seen an increase in multiple choice tests in my area (mathematics). We still require written answers and proofs. Some testing is computer-based but it requires entry of formulated results properly.
I find three challenges with YouTube and podcasts:
1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.
2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.
3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.
YouTube and podcasts are fine as an introduction to a topic, but they are and do encourage passive consumption. It's fine for reciting shallow factoids in class and getting grades, but won't make you an expert in a field. If you can't maintain enough attention to read, you'll always have to rely on processed, second hand information. That's why reading needs to be taught as a skill, and heavily encouraged.
Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books
The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll eventually reach a point where you need information that is only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.
There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about how a record number of university students in Sweden are struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of reading and extracting the necessary information needed from the textbooks.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life
That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.
It's sad on the human level too. A family member or friend may have a difficult issue that takes more than 2 minutes to discuss, but a person won't have the attention span to listen.
No wonder therapists are raking it in and short supply.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades
Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?
Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.
When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.
Remember when films used to be a tight 90 minutes of snappy editing. Now everything is getting close to 3 hours, it's not because the stories are better or more complex it's people not being ruthless in their editing.
I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing words.
Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to focus their effort.
That is very true, although I also have the opposite example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one for calculus) were so dense with information that I could not make head and tails
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.
> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].
Proof needed. You can't just say that.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.
The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.
And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.
> ...secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago.
On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation, because more than just the test has changed since that time. For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are the present-day students being taught to a test from four decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would need to control for in order to accurately compare performance over time. Although there are certainly people who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance. What do people need to know now, and what books should be read by students in order to learn it?
I actually did a few math exams recently (I was helping someone study for them), and they were really too easy. I had a hard time catching up with uni maths after breezing through secondary school, but if they nowadays enter with that level, it must be a nightmare.
Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more efficient to build a high level map of the subject using podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and the end result is the same.
Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.
Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...
The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.
The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.
I don't see any serious "right way" as you describe it. In particular I don't see a lot of motivation from social groups, and the Internet is horrible for good feedback because lots of people respond to things from a purely emotional place.
For instance, if you want to use the internet to get ahead of your curriculum, you can watch Khan Academy videos and do exercises. Not all that different from doing the same with a book, but with the internet you get a lot of curated material for free.
You can connect with other learners, you can ask questions on forums.
They get excellent grades because they make sure the professor feels that they agree with them on political and ideological issues. Be a nice and friendly person, and agree with the academics on their political beliefs and you will get good grades. Knowledge has nothing to do with academic grades.
You could as well have written that you know young people who get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their school papers.
Every time I read about the next generation not being able to read, I recall all the boomers falling for penis enlargement pill scams again and again. Exactly the people who complain about standard tests being too easy nowadays are the people who panic at the sight of a self-checkout.
Seeking out just other viewpoints that agree only with you and your initial beliefs, usually by people grifting and making money of of having said viewpoints is definitely much worse and not at all what “educated” means.
Keep in mind that some of the criteria have changed as well over time, probably not as fast as technology itself, but skills like reading comprehension are tested for less in favor of e.g. tech literacy.
Internet is a faster printing press therefore more people can be subjected to more lies than before, but the issue at hand, the one mentioned in Sagan's quote, is orthogonal to that question and predates it. Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions?
Can printed books save us?
I admit I oftentime rejoice that printing felt out of fashion, so the printed books that are left are saved from the progress of psyops and the invasion of AI, which may make it easier for future generation(s?) to see through the blindfold of fantasies that will be setup for them.
The article site 1984 as an illustration of how printed books can help resist surveillance. Well, it did not turn out that great for the main character of that book.
They were also a bit far from the Americas, which might have contributed to the economic boom of Europe more than the faster spreading of new ideas via books, no?
The kind of colonization that happened in America also happened in several other places, again and again, through history. In no other case is was followed by an industrial revolution.
In fact, China was just fading away from a very similar boom when Europe started expanding. And the Otomans have had their own boom some centuries before.
And China did develop a mechanical press, and decided to control an censor it too. But I don't think the GP is correct on using that as a strong cause.
I'm not talking about wealth per se, but industrialization. Without it, they failed to develop adequate military technology, transportation infrastructure, and agricultural efficiency to free up labor for industrial work. They also lacked coal reserves, and oil was not be a factor until too late in the game.
What I found particularly disturbing about this was that I had to swipe away two pop ups and a lower banner just to start reading. All the while my subconscious was asking if I would like to just pick up a book. Then I got distracted by an ad for another article on the right of the screen. .
Someone mentions Postman below so I'm tempted to add: can the tech crowd try a bit of Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Mark Fisher, Marhsall McLuhan, presumably loads of others I don't know about who have done work in these areas, and then maybe Michel Desmurget on the more science-based side of it if they want to avoid any airy-fairy theory.
It's arguably especially wild that Desmurget doesn't get a mention in these discussions. Or, I mean, it would be wild in a world where there was a smooth and effortless flow of good ideas and arguments between people, maybe over some sort of transcontinental network...
A lot of the topics that people have opinions about when it comes to screens and devices and health and etc have loads of studies on them. Which doesn't mean that everything is all solved, there are unexplored and uncertain areas, but reading these discussions you'd think there was no data out there whatsoever. There's tons!
It doesn't mean either that people can't enjoy sharing opinions, some of the anecdotes are interesting and insightful, but there seems to be a few obvious arguments which are basically non-arguments that get trotted out, and which seem to be hindering a more fruitful discussion.
How many times have we seen someone make a point about the bad type of screen-use for someone to say: "yeah, but I use ________ like _________." or "yeah, but when you read books you're being antisocial as well." and so on. The research on the topic distinguishes carefully between the different types of use! Etc etc, I could go on.
Wanted to add Marshal McLuhan impulsively upthreads, but restrained myself, and read everything else first. Have something to amend your list with, though:
Michel Desmurget is a well-respected neuroscientist working in research in France, so the Sokal thing is totally irrelevant to him, presumably? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Desmurget
The Sokal affair is a funny thing yes, which I'd seen before (and I presume many people here are familiar with). I don't see how it's relevant here?
I mean - it was one journal, in 1996, that had no peer review process, that published a fake article someone sent in to prove a point that the journal publishes at least some crap...
What should we reject based on that in your opinion - all cultural and media studies presumably, at the very least, you seem to be clearly suggesting. And every philosopher too? The logicians? The linguists? All of social science? Economics too? Is it just STEM-type stuff that's acceptable then?
Seems preposterous to me. The soft sciences are looser, and definitely have a higher proportion of hand-wavy nonsense, but rejecting it all to avoid stuff you don't like is just silly. Learning to avoid the crap and find the good stuff is pretty similar to other fields.
And often, anecdotally, it seems to me that the more interesting figures in the experimental sciences tend to be very intrigued by the softer, arguably sometimes "trickier" questions that the non-STEM sciences can explore.
Wow, there you go. This is quite the straightforwardly authoritarian statement, if followed through on (though I doubt you actually follow it through).
If some politicians and engineers wanted to lay train tracks down straight through the middle of a town, would the locals have a say in the matter, in your opinion? Or should they leave those decisions to the experts?
I do imagine you're not really serious though. To illustrate that - let's imagine for the sake of argument that Julian Assange (or Richard Stallman, or Kent Pitman, or whoever whose political opinions you might dislike) would code rings around you.
Would you suddenly take their opinion seriously? You wouldn't, if you didn't like them or their opinions. You'd come up with some other ad hoc reason why they could (and must!) be totally ignored. I mean, please correct me if I'm wrong here.
So why maintain the pretense that you're rejecting these people because they're not a part of the coding tribe, of which you're such a proud member and staunch representative?
You are reading too much into it. I am simply unwilling to listen anymore to the commentariat (roughly those working at newspapers, think tanks and/or having degrees in political science, media, communications, or sociology) attacking tech. It has become a tribal issue where political hay is being made and politics drags all debates down to mudslinging.
In short: Talk is cheap, I want to see that they have also done the legwork. That the issues is based on actual facts, and that it comes from a genuine desire to know and solve a problem.
The issue isn't about "screen vs. print", the issue is about "critical, discerning, questioning mind" vs. "mindless consumerism".
The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers.
It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior.
And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1].
I think it's much more fundamental than this; the new speed and new methods with which information can be spread are themselves the problem. Misinformation is downstream of this. The more fundamental problem seems to be tribalism, which sort of information can be spread quickly, (anything with strong emotional content, outrage, etc.) and the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding. (eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round? Or, do they know the earth is round because this is what they've been taught. I'll bet most of HN does understand this, but most people could no produce this if asked without any sort of preparation.)
The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.
> eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round?
During the "there are flat-earthers" fad I realized that for the majority of people it doesn't matter whether it's flat or not, the question whether it's flat or round actually only arises when they need to perform an action which depends on the Earth's shape, which is never, because most people are not pilots, not astronauts, etc., so for them, the model of Earth being flat works perfectly well.
It's the same as people saying that Earth is round for most intents and purposes, and then a smart-ass saying "actually, it's not a perfectly round ball". Yes, it's not a perfectly round ball, but we're discussing time zones here, not local weather patterns.
Most people say that Earth is round not because they believe it's the correct model for their use case, but because they want to belong to the club of people perceived as smart, and that's the view expected of a "smart" person. The flat-earthers perfectly uncovered this charade, by showing that most people just parrot "Earth is round" because that's the social consensus which just so happens to be true.
> the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding
This hits the nail on the head. In the end, I am trusting other people to do the experiments and reporting the findings.
I can regurgitate a lot of stuff about science, but in the end I believe it because I grew on the scientist side of the fence. If you look at conspiracy theories, the thing they always do is come up with a reason not to believe in the established authorities.
Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913 dictionary. Best of all, I can prop up my tablet on the elliptical trainer and read for an hour while my heart rate moves through the first four zones as increasing amounts of oxygenated blood rush through my brain causing the words to burn like fire in my mind.
Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper.
This. I couldn’t agree more. The text is searchable, indexable, word definitions can be searched right within the text, highlights are saved and indexable, etc.
Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.
Reading great books has been one of the best experiences of my life. But even as an ardent bibliophile, I can't deny that the medium has several serious shortcomings. Books are often far too long. Their quality is uneven (anyone remember the Wheel of Time series?). In the modern era, the production, marketing, promotion, and review of books has become highly politicized. Internet text - blogs, tweets, etc - has the potential to repair these issues.
I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records.
In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year.
Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
> Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.
Totally agree! I subscribe to one magazine which is published once a quarter, it costs me about $40/year for the subscription but is well worth it to me as the content is not available anywhere else. Definitely a niche market but the rag does a very good job of catering exactly to its market. There’s still some ads but only a handful per issue that normally has 60-100 pages total.
“when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
> Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when the conventionally powerful people own the content producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not simple at all, who to listen to.
this type of situation is not unique in human history - it happens after the invention of any device that disseminates information on a mass scale. for example, see the printing press:
> The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the past when faced with this problem.
I think the Internet medium is sufficiently different from past advancements that such analogies don't work. It's not necessarily that the Internet brings fundamentally different capabilities, perhaps we can reason about how its new scale makes some capabilities emerge as others, but it's the same outcome either way.
What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow readers.
I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows you to context switch to a million different things, and even an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work.
There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours to the library/store to return the old one and download a new one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero, you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you took the time to pick out.
> Only selected few buy books, because it costs money
I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)
Writing digitally is cheaper but that's exactly why distributing or getting reach is not cheap at all. You still need cost and proof of work in getting noticed by algorithms, as well as people who usually set trends. In fact, the lower cost of production means that more niche things get written than there would have been a market for.
There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a crisis don’t have a principled argument as to how things are worse.
But surely there are also more truths, and they spread faster than ever before? The amount of lies has increased but so has the amount of information in general, any question you have can be answered within 10 seconds.
IIRC one of the common factor with genius/prodigies of yesteryears is they all worked 1:1 or in a small group with some reasonably talented teachers. Unfortunately that is not scalable for mass, so may be custom designed Device + LLM may work better than giving up digital.
Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in a class full of kids much smarter than me.
As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).
Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often.
The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.
I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.
> "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
That seems a bit wasteful? Any time you want to read a new book you buy a whole new reading device? It might be cheap but that's more e-waste we don't need.
Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card? You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading experience can then be totally offline as you describe.
> It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
Oh no, that’s just… why?
At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.
I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
I think the main issue with this line of reasoning is that before all of these internet based forms of content, did many people actually read literature, like is mentioned in the article? I am not sure, but I would expect that the books that were read were probably not some high form of art but entertainment - which is fine of course, and it is different to a large extent from scrolling tiktok, but does it like up with the authors thesis about reading providing some deeper form of enlightenment? Maybe it still does, since it's still the same act of reading, but maybe not as much, since it's not normal "intellectual content"
> “Wen Stephenson at the Chicago Review claimed […] he experienced no difference in parsing Seamus Heaney on the page as opposed to the screen, asking “does it matter that it is transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? …the question is beginning to bore me by now.”
Well said. For the act of reading digital origin changes the quality but only in minor ways. What we all failed to anticipate we’re the gross effects of segmentation, disintegration, infinite duplication of media.
The reason for epistemological collapse is that people peeked behind the curtain and found that the experts were just normal people endowed not with some magical knowledge but just making things up as they go.
I can do that, too, and sometimes I am better at it. Given that, I prefer reader-side filtering over writer-side filtering.
I'm skeptical there is any epistemological collapse. Checking Wikipedia because I'm rusty on that stuff, it has epistemology as "the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge." As someone old enough to have been reading paper books pre internet I don't think that's collapsed at all. The very fact that I can look it up on Wikipedia and reference Reddit is a step forward.
Boring article. How does it go from blaming computers in general and then just picking on Twitter and Reddit - as if these two websites are representative of everything a computer is used for.
Ed Simon's reflection on Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies in In Praise of Print thoughtfully challenges the prevailing assumption that digital media will inevitably replace print.
The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable, and not the content.
This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books. It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet.
The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed.
Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed out how long form content trains concentration, short and long term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.
Perhaps the author doesn't make the case well, but the implication is that reading print primes the mind in a way that presents better emotional and intellectual consumption of the content.
The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.
I went and checked the page in another browser with my adblocker off. Wow. Just wow. I started using ad blockers on everything a few years ago because they became a little too annoying. I somehow missed when the web became nigh unusable from them.
We really fucked up when we didn’t regulate smart phones like weapons grade uranium.
It’s so fucking toxic. And I’m well aware there are gems in the museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers of gift shop TikTok shit (and it’s plausible that YouTube will be Alphabet’s undoing because YouTube is great for education and a well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a dockyard crane).
Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low capital gains are rape) can’t cope: it’s no longer just implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis, society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a successful match “churn”, and just every godawful thing.
The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for the “best version of the argument”.
Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form in charge of anything worth a billion dollars.
There are gems, it’s not all garbage, but if every smartphone on the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis.
And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP astrology says things are.
A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and physical destruction.
Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?
> an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction
Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth.
That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed.
Haven't read the article but this just sparked a thought that this is similar to email spam: given there's cost to printing you'd expect higher quality. Of course there are still bad actors and the deluded unfortunately.
When you live in a society that no longer values knowledge or compassion, there’s no point is wasting your time trying to go back to the old golden years. Maybe just accept anti intellectualism is the only way to succeed in the world and work around that? Elon Musk, the most successful man in the world is anti intellectual, why would you fool yourself into thinking there might be another future?
> Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism.
Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.
>“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,”
This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged.
So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms.
Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
>Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.
Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise.
But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like:
>The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
> all produced information is unavoidably narrativization
This is a future possibility but it has not yet come to pass, and we can still avoid it. We are not yet adrift in a sea of epistemological relativism where everyone has their own truth, and no objective truth can be discerned. We don't need to succumb to this kind of nihilism. Truth and objective reality are still discernable and approachable. Philosophical objections to the Truly objective viewpoint are not the limiting factor.
"Everything is just a narrative" is the cry of those who don't have truth on their side. The current state of mass media is the result of their cries becoming louder. We don't have to go along with it.
I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment.
Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.
I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons.
So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.
This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep.
You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.
> Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read.
I think you may be on to something, but I would also add that maybe you should consider whether prior to the age of 13 may also be a viable range. I think 13 to it depends is when the problem (roughly, the mind/ego "coming into its own", or something like that) manifests.
Disagree about the age threshold on epistemology. Being introduced to Hume in my teenage years is what got me to repeatedly revisit and reconsider old ideas, and look for new ones in much the way you describe. Human mental life & development isn't so simple as arbitrary age boundaries and specific, fixed learning environments.
Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points, benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem.
This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon, and see that as something that sets you free and puts the onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight into flimsy pseudo-certainty.
It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing books like that, they were accused by more conservative contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it as something to celebrate and explore.
We presume that it is us who have digested the thinness of the veil of reality who should be deciding epistemological questions but it is the younger generations who have grown up in this environment of 'Hacking the Matrix' who have the moral right to do it.
The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the
individual, it undermines all social institutions.
A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological
Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and
meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people
talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration
in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth,
veracity.
Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in
one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it
everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it -
rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at
this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and
record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less
"unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic
test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do
you really know about the relation between an LED and covert
surveillance.
In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge
and maybe to use it in a different way.
>You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with the corpus of works.
In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the next 6 months.
Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to all the journals legally unlike the average person.
If one is able to be comfortable with the unknown (a state that can't be escaped except through a simulation), checking everything isn't required.
It's like juggling three balls in a way: if you can't do it, it isn't necessary to believe you can. So too with knowledge, except it's like a thousand times as hard.
The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.
I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language. Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a higher standard in a piece about literature and written media and books.
Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.
Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.
Also it's kind of hard to find definite statements to agree or disagree with. I mean it's all like "the arc of the moral universe had turned in part because of the supposedly liberatory power of technology". What does that actually mean? What is the arc of the moral universe? Which way did it turn? I wasn't aware it actually had an arc.
Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.
I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers: git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)
I can’t help but imagine some of the folks this message is referring to as “needing to read more” seeing this and dismissing it as using language of “the elites”. There’s a certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.
I put random paragraphs into a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level assessment calculator, which suggests the US school grade level required to understand the assessed text. It consistently returned between Grade 8 and 9.
The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
I'm mildly affected by "modern web" issues, and I reckon that the imaginative part of my brain is in a coma whenever I browse these sites. The minute I'm outside of an internet connection, a whole lot of emotions, ideas, plans come back at once. And very very rarely can I browse the web while not losing that. This is something I didn't experience before... say smartphones, even with a good dsl line, i wasn't dilluted in pages likes that.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
I experience the same thing when I travel, especially when I travel on foot or by bicycle. These long periods of low stimulus thought are really helpful. It makes me want to do a lot of things off-screen.
When I am home I really struggle to put things into practice because the easiest thing to do when I wake up is to look at my phone before I sit at my computer.
I do a lot of meaningful work on the computer, but I’m uneasy about how frictionless it is to just be on the computer and never act in the real world.
You’re commenting on an article about reading, which is also a solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you’re not trying to make the point that reading books destroys relationships and self construction, so this seems like a roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption activity is better than what other people choose.
Reading a book is not really passive. Especially if it's a good book. You have to constantly imagine the layouts and the connections the book is trying to draw. For me, after years of Internet, getting back to books made me appreciate my younger self because books need active imagination and follow-through in the brain. I was able to do that effortlessly when I was a child. In fact, if you read all the HN comments the way you read books, it will be challenging(if you have no book reading habits).
I don't use imagination when I read. The connections are instinctual, and the layouts are often irrelevant (which I can say because I've never attempted to consider them and don't ever find myself missing out on the story).
I'd like to say I'm astounded when I hear other people visit other worlds when they read, but really that whole idea is so foreign to me, it might as well be a complete lie. I have no thread in which to pull on to begin to imagine it. I chalk it up to aphantasia, but my point is that not everyone processes and interacts with the world in the same way you might.
So when a scene is described, what happens in your head? You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts? If someone gets punched in the face that conjures an image of a fist connecting with a face for me.
> You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts?
"dry list" was your description, not mine. But also, no. Take the common example;
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
You don't have to imagine a picture of shoes, nor of a for sale sign to go... "oh, shit...".
Or even even that's too far to grasp... consider the melody of happy song, or a sad song. I assume you don't imagine a piano to figure out which it is?
Yes, I was trying to figure out how that would work, describing how I imagined it as a starting point. Not saying that’s how you experience it (hence the question mark)
I don’t have to imagibe baby shoes to understand what they are, or what happened, but if I read ‘baby shoes’ there’s definitely an image of small shoes appearing in my mind (constantly morphing, because the description doesn’t give me anything to go off).
If I read ‘sad song’, some variation of a sad song will play in my mind.
Of course often you read many of those things in sequence, and the mental scene constructs itself as you learn more.
If you read quickly it’s a bit vague, not enough time to truly think about it, but it’s there. At least for me.
> “Bitch,” he repeated. The mallet came down. She shoved herself upward and it landed just below her kneecap. Her lower leg was suddenly on fire. Blood began to trickle down her calf. And then the mallet was coming down again. She jerked her head away from it and it smashed into the stair riser in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, scraping away the flesh from her ear.
Does your mind conjure no images while reading this?
Aphantasia is hard to explain, especially in a drive by comment.
I'm not the person you're replying to but the answer, for me, depends on what you really mean by conjuring images. Very technically no, I see no images for this but I don't know if that is truly the whole point of what you're asking.
I mostly understand what is happening but I also really struggle to get the angles right in my mind of someone swinging a mallet quickly and one time hitting a shin and the next aimed for the head so maybe I'm missing something.
There are other senses involved as well even though it isn't visual, including things like spatial reasoning or maybe even something like proprioception - like I said it's hard to explain.
I can imagine myself in this position better than I can "visualize" it happening to someone else.
Aphantasia is really annoying to explain to people, like trying to explain blindness to a person who's always seen. I can't "see" anything, but I'm able to reason about it and kinda trace what I imagine with my eyes.
Interestingly enough, I have very lucid dreams and have realized that I am able to visualize (with color!) inside of them. I can't imagine being able to do that at will while awake, must be amazing.
I also can "see" in my dreams! Aphantasia is so fascinating to me because it helps me think about all these senses in much smaller units. I think the more we study and learn about aphantasia the better we will understand the brain in general. It is kind of like a natural experiment where you can remove one piece of the system and reason about the whole because of what changes.
For example, I had never considered that there would be different processes involved with imagining something visual vs recalling it but now that seems super obvious to me! I love when something tweaks my perspective and suddenly a new world of possibilities is revealed.
This happens with all forms of art, it's not unique to the written word. With movies and TV you're imagining the world outside the frame borders. With paintings you're imagining the whole scene or story depending on the piece.
So there's a point here that TikTok is competing for leisure time that in its absence has a better chance of being imaginative but I think that undersells the creativity of social media to a degree.
I think that's the key thing. Social media bombards us with stimuli based on an algorithm optimizing for what will grab our attention best. It doesn't matter if it has value, or even if it can hold our attention, because there's always some new novelty in the pipeline.
Long-form writing ask us to choose a subject and then focus deeply and deliberately on it. It's more demanding and more rewarding.
Depends on the book. Depends on the TikTok.
You can have passive experiences via either medium. TikTok is really optimized for that shallow level of engagement though and books trend in the opposite direction.
I will say that it is different to me, but perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books.
To me, I do not reminisce or think about tiktoks / instagram posts having an impact on my life or how I think or how I interact with others. Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read. I kind of know this, as I'm thinking about books I read in highschool over 20 years ago at the moment.
I suppose they give me things to think about beyond the moment I'm reading them, they make me feel things I otherwise wouldn't etc. It's possible for these things in media like movies, and even tiktok too I would imagine.
The reverse is also possible for books to be junk that you read and enjoy in the moment but soon forget.
But I also think the algorithm / profit motive behind tiktok and social media in general tends to mean that it's more likely to be junk, and it's not the person's fault who gets pulled into that. They're brutally effective skinner boxes, imo. Just like some games (mmos and now live service for even shooters).
There's something missing in the current media landscape that the old one did have, which was finality. You read a book, it's over. Similar with older movies, but now we have a bit of the "keep up with the starwars or marvel" thingy which is a bit live service like if you think about it. A constant desire to make folks feel like they have to keep up. Yeah things had sequels before, so I'm probably just waxing nostalgic here.
I'm rambling, sorry, just wanted to share some of my current thoughts.
I'm sure if tiktok didn't exist, these folks would be putting on 24/7 soap operas instead. The desire for a background thing to passively consume has likely always existed. Be it radio, whatever.
The algorithm does seem to be ruthless these days though, god if I know what I mean by that.
> perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books
> Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read
Exactly what I was thinking. I can still tell you about the first novel I read, first trilogy, favorite books, least favorite, and also each of those per genre. I can tell you what was going on in my life at the time.
The only thing I can say about social media posts are that I have a handful of vague memories of times when someone I knew or knew of would post something that made me realize they had a side I didn’t know of, and not in a good way.
I’m reminded of a quote I read recently, paraphrased: social media connects limbic systems, not prefrontal cortexes. I might take issue with the pure dichotomous nature of that statement, but I think it holds generally.
A book sticks with you, but reels phase through you like light through a window. Once the book is finished, your mind races with ideas about the book; good or bad.
Instagram reels leave you with nothing. Once the next reel passes, the previous one is flushed down the memory, as if these last 28 seconds were nothingness.
While the humble reel only demands a vague trance-like state and your eyes turned to the phone, the books needs your full attention and mental capacity to be enjoyed completely.
Note that none of this is specific to books. Shows, movies, (solo) games. They're all about something. The point of instagram reel is being about nothing at all. Watching it to fill your head with void. A silent, temporary death. "Psychological obliteration" is particularly apt here.
It's a different sort of 'passive'. There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network which 'lights up' in very different ways, depending on what you do, and how. One could argue that is to be expected, because different regions of the brain are exercised. But that's not all of it. Regarding exercise, think of 'Use it, or lose it'. It's mostly the imagination which is exercised while reading. If it isn't, it shrivels.
I wouldn’t consider reading as a passive consumption. You have to 1. Lead and follow a tempo, essentially moving your eyes at the speed of you thought 2. Using imagination to associate what you read with other knowledges.
TV and ticktock don’t need 1. You can interact with a remote or you scrolling-thumb but interaction is not required to consume.
2. Isn’t a necessity neither but people do use TV, ticktock or music to "empty their mind" by thinking to nothing else but the consumption flow. You can do that with reading, but that’s not an experience people usually like and they come back to the place their mind left.
Number two but in book form is "beach reads" which can include your favorite trash romance or the latest "dad book" Vince Flynn / Clive Cussler / Tom Clancy thing. And given the huge popularity of the two genres folks are reaching for books to turn off plenty.
Reading is categorically different than the media characterized as passive here.
If you fall asleep with a book, you wake up on the same page. Advancement through the text is user-driven, not media-driven.
Reading, watching TV and using computers probably contributed to making me an idiot.
The family exodus, the nuclear family, the society of purchasers probably didn’t helped that much either.
>But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
Cervantes, 1605:
>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...
Now we're all Men of La Mancha.
This is essentially Neil Postman's argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death [0]. The basic idea is that the medium matters, and different media are better suited to different types of messages and discourse. This is why I rail against social media--in particular things like Twitter/X and Bluesky, because their basic structure leads to poor communication outcomes.
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.
I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.
Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.
But then you have people like my one friend, who is scrolling non-stop literally from waking to sleep. It's hard to even have a 3 sentence conversation as he's constantly elsewhere.
Ask yourself: What were the last 5 reels you watched?
pretty optimistic review of the power of the individual/mind contra the really fine-tuned algorithms of engagement. the hook is the “filling bits of (idle) time.” the accounting when all the filling of bits of time is done seems to add up to a huge sum. the extra time definitely would have been borrowed (read: stolen) from somewhere.
I agree that algorithmic feeds and even just having endless distractions in a hip pocket are terribly unhealthy. I thinks its wise to be very mindful with both and that they can quietly steal from other experiences that one might prefer in hindsight.
But I don't have a way to square that perspective with what the original commenter suggested about "psychological obliteration" and "addiction akin to gambling or heroin"
People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions. They're clearly not consuming or addictive in the same way as those others things, where people often make explicit wantonly destructive choices in service to their addiction.
And realistically, that they're a different kind of risk with a different kind of impact may make them even more dangerous from a health-of-society perspective, because we don't have great cultural insight or hygeine practices to deal with them. If we want to change that, we need to recognize that they don't represent the same danger we're used to.
So I'm not dismissing that they're bad. I'm just dismissing the original commenters' deeply strained and distracting characterization.
> People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions
If someone is paying, the transaction, by construction reinforces the psychological boundaries that obliteration eliminates. So I think not paying is part of it, just like addicts ignore the (perhaps partially non monetary) price of their behavior.
I think this is a very salient point, namely the danger of passive consumption is the losing the sense of oneself. We can be become so absorbed by the objects of our attention that we forget ourselves and this has very real consequences both on of physiology but also our psychology. So part of the solution is to "remember yourself" while you're consuming or directing your attention towards any object, so you are the subject and you are attending to an object. The last piece of the puzzle is that both you, the subject, and the object of your attention are located in space, so location/context is the third essential aspect of the experience to internalize for proper harmony, as far as I understand it.
I didn't see Andy Farnell's "Digital Self-Defense" mentioned, but I think it's relevant here -- analogous to how one should be cognizant of personal safety when navigating a city (or even while crossing a busy intersection).
https://www.solent.ac.uk/blogs/media-technology-blogs/digita...
Is reading HN comments also passive consumption that destroys ones self?
Asking for a friend...
Not if you scan for opportunities to write comments, lurkers yeah maybe but not active users.
Nay, even commenting is often pointless. HN likes to overly articulate drivel more often than not. Indeed, even this very comment is pointless, because what does it really add but another section in another chain of pointless drivel? Socializing is human. Any and all communication platforms like forums, or even Twitter, work to capitalize on the needless want to contribute something. Which is often unnecessary. I'd argue that lurking is often the smarter choice.
Not that books are exempt from the same problem. Many of them are pointless or suck too, but that's just part of living in a flawed world.
Sorry, it just sounds like a seemingly reasonable and eloquent, yet highly emotional speculation.
“There,” “here,” psychological obliteration—what is this but sciency reasoning, on par with boomers claiming, “Games make kids violent”?
“Your entire whole self is destroyed.” Jeez.
Is the OP using terms of art?
Is reading not also a “there” thing?
At least to me, reading is much more an "active" task. It takes effort to read that extra paragraph. My eyes are closing or wandering around. My hands are tempted to close the book and do something else, even if it's a book I like!
Thanks for articulating this phenomenon so well.
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It's (quite ironically!) an artifact of the social media culture itself: the shift towards increasingly unmoored, extreme language, disproportionate to whatever thing it's in response to. The effect of echo chambers both winding people up in agitation spirals, while tuning out influences that'd tend to tamp down the intensity.
"I wasted a few hours watching stupid videos and feel regretful about that" != "YouTube obliterated my soul!"
Eh, sorry if this wasn't clear, but obliteration is intended to have a specific meaning in my post. I'll clarify here.
Obliteration is like when "you," your conception of "your self" as an entity in the world ceases to exist. Like your internal thoughts turning off, minutes turning into hours, lack of awareness of your surroundings. If you've ever been to a casino or seen someone with a bad drinking problem, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Alternately (!), if you've ever seen someone in a pro tennis match, grandmaster chess tournament, (or as other commenters are rightly pointing out -- reading a really good book!) it's kinda like that too.
However, those productive activities are different for the soul in a way that I have trouble articulating.
I emphatically am not intending it as just like "thing that's really really bad."
I don't think it's unmoored or disproportionate at all, actually. Look at someone who is really locked in on one of these apps. Or do a search for social media addiction, that stuff really does wreck people's lives and is bad for the soul. A wide body of psychological research supports this. I am sharing what I have noticed and trying to understand what the causal mechanism is.
Mm yes. Quite ironic. Yes. Italics. !=, programming.
I'm interested in what people think about this. Maybe offer some constructive criticism instead of restating what I said and adding lol at the end?
I think the delivery might be sensational but I agree with the sentiment. Especially since you acknowledge that it isn't purely harmful. Normally I don't watch short form video but occasionally I do and I do feel it's a somewhat different state of mind. I would be worried about myself if I found it happening often.
I think it’s pretty clear the GP (and others) believe this is pseudopsychology bunk supported by neither any available evidence nor by professionals in the field.
It takes 1,000x less time and energy to come up with a pet theory de novo and sans any evidence than it takes to debunk. Without backing evidence provided for an idea, it should be as easy to dismiss out of hand as it was to create it in the first place.
He clearly doesn't mean "a few reels".
Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
Both composing text and reading map closely to thinking.
The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).
For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.
1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.
2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.
Or democracy will perish eventually.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "simple":
- News reporting is straightforward insofar as requiring a code. Opinion about news is where it gets messy - if someone has a TV or radio show where they render their opinions or thoughts about news events, that's first amendment territory.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "effective":
- Journalism probably must be scalably funded to scalably exist. We see currently that people are not willing to do that and that opinion heads pervade the "news and information" space. So requiring compliance to a code in order to profit off of journalism doesn't work for the same reason minimum wage doesn't really work - people can just choose not to interact with code-compliant journalism much like companies can just not hire people.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates both the above assertions "simple" and "effective" at once.
- You cannot separate any board of X from political interests, which are much more important if commercial interests are explicilty separated from X.
> Or democracy will perish eventually.
None of the above counters or invalidates this statement.
(Although the response is not gibberish, I can´t feel certain that I reply to a chatgpt response (?))
You take it too static. If you are waiting for the type-safe, leak free hammered approach, you will achieve nothing.
I want you to take this approach to get you going in the right direction.
- Opinion pieces are indeed a way where editorial boards go cheap, outsourcing meta thinking to external entities/influence. Those editorial boards going of the rails there is not an act of nature, but like in the case of the NYT a consequence of commercial ownership. As part of the code any opinion piece should be clearly marked as such, as well as the interests of the author. There is no need for scalable mega media corporations. In countries with 1) public news organizations[*] and 2) required independent editorial boards, commercial titles are not as going overboard as in the US. You can, but you can never be absolute 100% perfect.A peculiar, mindset has been programmed that ethics in society is defined in what what terms the lawyer wrote. A good society is all about what you collectively allow or disallow, no scheme, no law can perfectly defeat all bad actors all the time.
The social part of "society" is an activity. If you as normal people don't show up, then it will be a Murdoch party.
___
* independent from but financed by the state
> Amusing Ourselves to Death
From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.
I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern times.
Naively, I would think the same. But in the first part of AOTD, Neil Postman argues pretty convincingly that America in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most literate, bookish society on Earth and in the later parts of the book that that heritage was lost with the invention of the telegraph, radio, and later TV.
In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made us dumber in a real sense.
They were still speaking of subset of americans. One should look up the literacy rates of poor white or black americans of the time to get a better understanding of where the headspace of the average person might have been. There is a reason why politicians had to campaign by actually visiting and orally presenting their positions.
What do the historians of that era actually say about it ?
> Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article
Strange that religion isn't mentioned in the article.
Religion is the bedrock of epistemological 'collapse'.
Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?
I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
Let alone the median general public.
You can stop pretending that the contents of the news-show has any relation to reality.
IMO, the entire problem comes from this one lie. But you see... a lot of people wants this propaganda machine.
Also, nowadays you can stream deep journalism that people can adjust to their time availability. We usually call those "documentaries". Most of the stuff that carries that name is psychotic garbage too, but informative ones do exist.
How does the relation of news shows content to ‘reality’ matter?
Even if the announcers were reading complex fan fiction stories they would still need to break it up into tiny chunks.
Probably not, as long as we continue the requirement that all information conveyed to the public must be done in a way that is maximally profitable to the producer. As long as information must be profitable, it will inevitably cease to be information and turn into entertainment soon enough. When was the last time you saw a TV Station that wasn't majority ads?
At the same time its not like the harder information isn’t available. One can find factual news and pieces of information. This is what the policy wonks who craft policy that the pr wonks spin into soundbites have to be able to find and read to understand the world after all.
Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News isn’t to be informed for most people. It is for entertainment like any other fodder content shoehorned into some free minutes of your day. And that’s ok because as long as some technical people need to actually get things done, there is good information and data out there for you to actually learn about the world. It just will be in some dry .gov website or some other source perhaps instead of distilled down to a 2 min article written to a 6th grade reading level with a catchy headline on cnn.com, but thats OK. You will learn to appreciate the dryness and technical language.
I will say though we shouldn't underestimate habitual inertia in all things. My dad will probably watch Cable news till he dies. There's arguably far more interesting and entertaining things on the internet, that i have showed him to access and explore on his laptop, that he uses frequently. But his main source of news appears to be Cable still, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna change.
Then there was the great culling of newspapers and magazines. It was probably the last thing longer than a paragraph that my dad actually read consistently. They mostly went online, stopped being delivered and he was forced off of the reading experience. Sure, you can seek things like that out but it was serendipitous, they got less funding, raises prices, fox continued to foxify, i don't know that he's really read anything since! I, myself, am trying with some difficulty to begin reading more. I need the concentration back
My 2 cents: 1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.' More here https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a...
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
The COVID school closures and remote learning years will prove to be the biggest negative educational/developmental impact on a generation that we've seen in a long time.
And it disproportionately hit the poorest in society the most. My kid had his own room to work in, his own computer to work on, and WFH parents to help him out. He was not, massively, negatively impacted.
In my work, I was in touch with families with multiple children at home, no computers, maybe one or two phones, and no broadband connection. The kids, for all intents and purposes, just lost two years of education.
At least it will lay to bed the sentiment that nothing is learned at school, and that we all could have just stayed home and taught ourselves to code.
It also challenges the belief that what education needs right now is disruption.
I don’t think it will. See: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/27/republican-b...
I mean it looks like it might have sped it up but it already declined more than that from 2012. So whatever the general reason for the trend is worse.
>I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?
In "Slouching Towards Utopia" there's a lot of emphasis on "communities of practice". I think HN is a great example for software people. I wonder if the hollowing out of print media begins a vicious cycle where the community of practice also decays. People leave the industry, connections don't persist across jobs, fewer events, fewer new people coming in and getting excited, etc...
First lack of budget to keep them there full time, then they'll re-skill and change industries due to lack of job opportunities. Sooner or later they won't be able to easily go back, because tools, styles, and publisher and reader tastes change, as well
If you spend a decade or three learning and perfecting your trade, and spend a decade away from it without practicing, you'll be rusty (at best) regardless of what the job actually is
This fuels everything from shipbuilding to the military industrial complex - you practice and improve by constantly doing and refining, and your nation can end up a world-leader in designing microprocessors or building supersonic fighters
The middle class is being liquidated
Don't worry. When the next administration gets rid of the Department of Education, we won't have any idea how bad things are.
The Department of Education was founded in 1980. Are you worried we'll lose all the massive improvements in education we've seen since then?
That comment takes all facts and context out of the discussion and does not inform. Do you know what Title 1 is? 504? IDEA? I'm not going to defend garbage laws like No Child Left Behind, mind you, ask any teacher how terrible that law is. But both my kids, one autistic, one ADHD, have heavily depended on section 504 for their education. As for any decline in education, I would look instead at the anti-intellectual so-called 'family values' that have been on the rise since 1980.
Are demographics controlled for here? We know the proportion of foreign born has been increasing since the 70s, are these results attempting to remove the effect of non-native speakers?
>foreign born
Its probably more useful to distinguish between foreign educated vs born here.
Interestingly the last stats I remember seeing about ESL students is they tend to out-perform english students in a number of subjects depending on the age group, so factoring them out might lower the overall stats and show an even worse trend among native born english speaking American students.
There's another, more global research: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of weighty tomes..
Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks. Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10 or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least between the two.
I understand what you mean about spatial understanding, and personally do love the the comforting reference value of having actual books on your shelves and being able to go back to specific parts of them no matter what.
However, it's not hard to compensate for this with digital books, through bookmarking options, copy-pasting specific parts and storing them elsewhere (with tiny notes on page number and book title) and other options.
I keep all of my own digital books DRM-stripped in my own device folders and back those up too. This to at least partly replicate the possession security that physical books give. I also absolutely never trust storing large collections of them on something as absurdly untrustworthy as, for example, "Kindle on Demand", which is on-demand right until your access demand arbitrarily gets ignored no matter how much money you spent on what were supposedly owned purchases.
This, also writing on the page for notes or underlining for curiosities are for me just easier to do in a paper book then on a e-reader.
But that's just me being stuck in my ways. So and I see the use of digital versions as well. Specially as a lot of my technical books now often coming with a digital copy! It's best of both worlds.
Yeah, I had to look closely as well to figure out what this was saying. The core reasoning seems to be this one sentence: "Printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of the algorithm since tinkering with code can’t delete their contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive."
But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can read offline to keep someone over the network from tampering with contents. You can advocate for and obtain DRM-free experiences so tampering is easier to spot. You can make many copies of the bits for yourself, leaning into one of software's great strengths. So I think there are many ways to resist the "neon god" here. But we do each of us have to think for ourselves about the consequences of our choices.
If only there was a place starting with p and ending with "irate bay" where you could get forever copies of books.
Piratebay has always been a poor source for most books. Another site that gets much less attention than zlibrary is as far as I'm concerned an incredible source of books. libgen.
One problem, though: purveyors of forever copies don't themselves last forever.
Books last longer than hard drives.
i think most folks have moved on from tpb to either zlib or DRM free legal sources (like Kobo)
But the tome's weight is borne up by the table, whereas throwing any light in your face will affect your eyes. Possibly dawn and twilight gazing are quite beneficial.
Cronus eats his children.
In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'"
In short, Cronus eats his children.
Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has always been so, or worse.
It's basically constant that many people will fearmonger and some will embrace new technology. I think this is basically independent of the actual merits and drawbacks of the given technology. Regardless of these strange asymptotes, I would say technology has been advancing from less benefit/risk to more in time, and so we will get closer to the fearmongerers being right. I suppose it could mean that we harness the benefits and waive the risks, but in practice it seems unlikely.
<golf clap>
It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
> Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots
Tautology.
> The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group
There is no causal link here.
It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always.
Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.
> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group
Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
There's two things going on here:
- things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job"
- people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be true.
> things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable
"Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here.
Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value.
FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc.
Did they ever speak out against torture, or illegal war? How much? Did they ever go into the long term advantages of Jill Stein's economic plans; or Bernie's? How much?
The fact that we spent over $8 trillion in a murderous money laundering scheme should have been front page news every day for years. The costs of our incredible and historic inequality are rarely discussed, and if they are, it's in the most limp manner imaginable. The opportunity cost of all this fuckery, from a rational economic perspective, is mind blowing.
The Overton Window is now looking onto bipartisan genocide, after decades of bipartisan illegal war and an extreme agenda of Islamophobia.
> people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases
People like Musk buy news sources to spread their biases. Same for Murdoch, Turner, Bezos, etc.
I think the reason why the FT, among others, don't spend much space on human rights issues is because they are inherently transactional publications in nature. You have to pay to subscribe, and those who do expect something in return - I suspect that this is usually a sense of being 'in the know' on business matters. Obviously knowledge of Jill Stein's manifesto is not going to make its readers any money in the foreseeable future.
I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe. Compare this to the tabloids, which don't charge for online access and make money by peddling particular business or political interests - mostly shady business, I think most would agree. I'd therefore trust FT on the facts, albeit probably not for wide coverage.
> I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe
No ulterior motive? I really don't know about that.
They're better than most, because they generally tell the truth - a shockingly low bar - but it's a specific type of truth, as seen from a specific and very narrow window, from a deliberate vantage point.
Always viewing the world from that specific window belies a motive, conscious or not, to maintain a highly destructive status quo. They are not seeing the forest for the trees, while writing factual and detailed reports on the least consequential tree bark facts.
Which is fine, if tree bark facts are your bag, I guess - but I'm more concerned about the rapidly deteriorating forest.
I'm having a hard time understanding what your complaint is.
That the worlds premier capitalist publication publishes facts capitalists find useful?
Yes.
Also bears shit in the woods.
> I'm having a hard time understanding what your complaint is.
That the word reliable was being used to describe the FT.
'Reliable' within a certain narrow context for the people trashing our potential (ie, the capital class)? Yes.
'Reliable' within a broader context, where we get to the root causes of our catastrophic inequality, our over extraction of resources, our environmental destruction, our war mongering leaders, etc? Also yes; but in precisely the wrong way. They can be relied on to support whatever makes the yacht class more money in the next few quarters.
This matters because corporate media has been truly complicit in much of our impending doom/s; the FT being far from an exception.
Handy tip: If someone's point seems very obvious, like where bears shit, it's usually worth reading the comment again to see if you've missed something. Ie in this case, the entire second half of my comment.
> 'Reliable' within a broader context, where we get to the root causes of our catastrophic inequality, our over extraction of resources, our environmental destruction, our war mongering leaders, etc? Also yes; but in precisely the wrong way. They can be relied on to support whatever makes the yacht class more money in the next few quarters.
They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else. Something being important doesn't mean it should be written about everywhere.
> They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else.
Financial news from a specific and narrow viewpoint. There are others.
This is the third time I've said it now. It would be nice to know where the confusion is coming from. Is it simply that many people can't imagine any alternate view of finance news, other than that sold by FT?
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
I'll try one more time - just for you llm.
What if, back in the slavery days, a newspaper reported solely from the perspective of slaveholders, never slaves. They only printed 'facts' - how much a slave could be expected to depreciate by age, which regions produced the hardest working slaves, etc.
Would this be a 'reliable' paper? Would it just be 'financial news'? Would it simply be a 'premier capitalist publication publishing facts capitalists find useful'? Well, yes, in a way.
And that's exactly what financial newspapers back then did. They traded in dry, money making facts - in support of a deeply exploitative and unsustainable system. Always from one particular perspective - the slaveholder's; that of the ownership class.
'Reliable' isn't a word I would have chosen to describe them.
In more modern times, FT takes huge ad money from fossil fuel companies, cheer-leads the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, has never met a neoliberal/neocon since that they didn't love; and takes the view of the 0.1% 99.9% of the time. Almost completely heedless of the permanent damage that is being done to all life on Earth as a result, except as a side note in an article about how apocalypse might affect your portfolio.
Will any of this sink in? Can you change your mind, or at least the subject? Let's see.
> How much?
Such an important (and often unpopular) followup question.
Part of it is a sort of pascals wager being done, where it becomes rational and logical to play this game as it is for yourself however unsavory, because the incentives for playing it as such are high enough where people will always do it. Altruism towards the collective species fundamentally takes a backseat for individual and kin survival. There are plenty of species where the mother will even eat any offspring who don’t flee them after birth soon enough because the incentives for the mother even out way that small affordance of altruism to kin. Biology is about entropy not emotions at the end of the day.
Maybe what's most important to them isn't what's most important to you.
Have you contemplated such possibility?
Yes, the ultra wealthy have different priorities to what I would call important. The yachts, deregulation, tacit (or not) support for torture, illegal wars, pollution, private jets, ostentatious displays of conspicuous and pointless wealth, etc, leave that in no doubt.
Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow? Like Zorg's little speech [0] about the benefits of destruction (the broken window fallacy)?
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkFAcFtBD48
> It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
You said they are dodging 'genuine understanding'.
I am saying you aren't the final word on what 'genuine understanding of everything most important' is.
In other words - you are using lots of words to say 'I want others to do more of the stuff I want them to do and less of the stuff they are doing because the stuff I want them to do is obviously good and the stuff they are doing is obviously less good'.
Thing is, almost everyone thinks this. Given that almost everyone already thinks this way and the world isn't what you want it to be, maybe something about such a worldview is off. Or maybe we just need more of people like you in positions of power and you'll fix it :) Where have I heard that one before?
So anyone who uses the phrase "genuine understanding" is secretly a wannabe power-hungry authoritarian? Dunno about that one bud.
And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption, or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal gain, that's not obviously perverse to you; it's just one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
Well, pick your prophet; pick your genius; they all say the same thing:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
- Jesus.
"By his craving for riches the foolish man slays himself, as if he were slaying others."
- Buddha
"The mutual rivalry for piling up of worldly things diverts you, until you visit the graves."
- The Qur'an
"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
- Socrates
"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
- Seneca
"The more you have, the more you want. The more you have, the less you are."
- Tolstoy
"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
- Einstein
"Wealth is like seawater: the more you drink, the thirstier you become."
- Schopenhauer
"A small terrace by the mountain stream, living at ease, free from the burdens of the world — this is better than the glory of an emperor."
- Zhuangzi
Etc, etc, etc.
Some people, really, truly, have a genuine understanding of this concept. And many, probably most incredibly wealthy people, with every possible opportunity, can't grasp it for the life of them. That's not really "my opinion"; it's the opinion of anyone worth listening to.
>And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption, or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal gain, that's not obviously perverse to you; it's just one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
Pretty much, yes.
Yesterdays vapid conspicuous consumption is tomorrows minimum living standard.
Three meals a day every day forever?
Even medieval kings had to go on a diet when famine struck.
> Yesterdays vapid conspicuous consumption is tomorrows minimum living standard.
The way of life of our billionaires is threatening all life on the planet, particularly the poorest [0]. There might not be a living standard if we don't fix this issue.
0 - https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-mo...
It isn't the billionaires emitting that, it is all the factories they own that produce products for the middle class. If the middle class didn't consume those then they wouldn't have been made and the pollution wouldn't be there.
Billionaires emit a bit more, but not that much more.
Note the very disingeneous comment here:
> tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments
"Private jets" and "polluting investments" were in the same sentence as if they were in the same ballpark, but its the investments that count for almost everything and they would be polluting regardless if the billionaires owned them or not.
> Oxfam found that, on average, 50 of the world’s richest billionaires took 184 flights in a single year, spending 425 hours in the air —producing as much carbon as the average person would in 300 years. In the same period, their yachts emitted as much carbon as the average person would in 860 years.
That's not "a bit more". That's insane.
And there's absolutely nothing disingenuous about it, because the article clearly states:
> the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.
> Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
... I don't know why this isn't convincing to you, but it's not Oxfam's fault.
If course what you're saying can be taking to absurdity too. Take the paradox of intolerance, if we let the intolerant have power they will wipe out anyone they don't like, hence why we have laws against things like murder.
profit. they have the best information money can buy and they use it to make profit.
Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.
> a perfect motive
It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant:
> Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
- Alanis Obomsawin
This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years.
Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
Will the last tree be cut? New England has much more three cover than it has a couple hundred years ago.
> Will the last tree be cut?
It's a metaphor (though in many parts of the world it's a simple fact); but yeah, it could be global some day. I wouldn't put it past us. We've lost countless species already.
We've been abysmal to trees. If we were to keep losing forest at our current global rate we'd lose the last tree in 400-800 years (though tbf this is decelerating right now).
New England has more tree cover than 200 years ago - great. Europe too. Is 200 years ago a good reference point though? Isn't that when we chopped like 80% of our forests down for industrialization?
Anyway, so the centers of Empire are green(ish). How's the Amazon doing though? How's South-East Asia? Central Africa?
And our new forests - are they old growth and diverse, or monoculture Sitka spruce? Organic, or doused with glyphosate?
And then there's the climate, which we are fucking up faster than scientists predicted... Can trees adapt in time? ... Would trees survive nuclear holocaust?
I'm not saying Bladerunner was a documentary. But we're on course for catastrophe, no doubt about it; and the relentless pursuit of ever more capital via externalized costs is why.
>Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
Lets assume all people when given the opportunity will do what is in their own best interests first.
The less power you have, the more working with others is in your own best interest.
The more wealth you have, the more power you have and the less you _need_ to work with others to achieve what you want or need, so you have an increased ability to weigh what is best for you vs what is best for everyone.
At some point the wealth/power split is so much that you can effectively stop caring about what everyone else wants and pursue what you want and what benefits you.
So while they may have better information, they aren't incentivized to decisions that are less harmful to everyone.
> Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
All of those can be leveraged for profit if one is cynical and self-serving enough. Most of 'them' that fall into these categories know to some degree the actions they take are harmful to others, and frankly they don't care. Either in their own self-interest, or deluded interests of whatever group they identify with.
You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on?
I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context.
Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.
On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.
I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.
They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.
I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.
People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
Power, like money, is mainly inherited.
This sounds more like a slogan, a belief, than a fact.
It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]
Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]
We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.
This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.
What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.
[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
> It’s not true for the extreme top end
Any extreme is, by definition, unusual. You don’t need to be a billionaire (which is what the articule you linked to focus on) to be considered powerful or wealthy.
Tellingly, that articles notes that:
> The proportion of those in the list who grew up poor or had little wealth remained constant at roughly 20 percent throughout the same period.
Which suggests that inheriting power and money does make a difference in your chance of success. They continue:
> Most individuals on the Forbes 400 list did not inherit the family business but rather made their own fortune.
But one does not follow from the other. Inheriting a business is not the only way to have a leg up. If you’re well off you have the opportunity to risk going into some venture on your own and fail, because you have a safety net. Furthermore, your affluent family can and probably will make a difference in your business. I’m reminded of a piece of news a while back where a couple of rich kids were bragging they made their company successful “from scratch” but upon further inspection into it was revealed their customers were rich friends of their parents.
There is no self-made wealth. You can't become wealthy without the labour of other people.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billion...
The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
You know you’ve gone off the deep end when you call Musk an “entrepreneur” in quotes instead of what he is - a regular, if excellent, entrepreneur.
Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of prominence from there.
That’s fundamentally different from inheriting power even if you’re a dunce as kings once did.
No, he's not, he's a douche born into criminal wealth that organisations he ends up in needs to protect themselves from.
Today he's also a fascist grifter who's entered into politics. For some reason usians don't revolt when their political system elects rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right, so I'm hoping it'll turn into something like a kingdom that they find it in themselves to overturn.
Hard to believe now, but for quite a long time he focused on visionary technology, was an exceptional business man, an inspiring builder and leader of his organizations.He also demonstrated other unusual skills in ways people forget, never noticed, or sneer at ignorantly. Successfully navigating the national red tape for both Tesla and SpaceX, in industries with extremely entrenched regulatory captivating incumbents, demonstrated just one of many non-obvious skills.
Today?
He incessantly spews anti-inspirational anti-rational anti-social and anti-business diarrhea to an alarming and epic degree. He drives Twitter/X’s business logic like a drunk going the wrong way on a highway, seemingly intent on hitting every guardrail he can find.
So far SpaceX and perhaps to a lesser degree Tesla are getting by on the deep talent he gathered in better times.
He is an unusual person.
No, most of the reporting from "his organizations" is about how they defend themselves against him and blow the whistle about security concerns, plus the union busting and wage theft and so on. Plus the story about how Thiel kicked him out to save PayPal.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are military labs behind plausible deniability, dual-use aprons. Hence they're run to a larger extent by people who aren't him and he works like a neat distraction for outsiders.
Much like Thiel he doesn't show any "deep talent". That's something other people are bringing to the organisations they're part of.
This is hogwash.
Dramatic exits after successful acquisitions are common. You have to earn “failures” like that.
That created SpaceX’s seed capital.
(You can’t have it both ways. If he had convinced the US to bankroll him, that would have been serious business acumen.)
Minor success on hard problems, with a shoe string budget, and an attractive business plan (vertical integration, fast-failure iteration, reusability) got investment capital flowing.
More successes, more capital.
Result: They changed the economics of space launches & save money for all their customers, including NASA & the military.
No resemblance to nepo operations or results. See Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
$ billions of dollars burn with each SLS launch. Massive delays & cost plus overruns. For now.
Thiel put him aside before the IPO, which was before Ebay bought them.
There's been a lot of reporting about how SpaceX is keeping Musk's influence at a minimum. If you go looking you'll also find video from interviews with Musk in that role where he isn't talking from a script and comes across as a clueless high schooler.
Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
I don’t like one-sided trolls who are insecure that some other people are exceptional?
Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
—
More productively:
I don’t have an axe to grind either way, other than giving credit where it is due, and vice versa.
My original comment reflected both.
He has done some truly incredible work. He earned his success.
Lately, he is a mess with completely different priorities.
I imagine many employees in all his companies are happier when he is not around these days. And would be happy if he stopped posting opinions, given the downstream impact to their brands.
Do I come across as insecure?
What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
> Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
I responded to your pointless, inaccurate and rude conjecture with an equally pointless, rude, and what I assumed was an equally inaccurate conjecture to suggest that perhaps we keep our conversation substantive.
If the sense in that still isn’t clear, you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
> What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
I don’t know how “success” could be any more evident.
But if you believe you see shortcuts that were taken, then perhaps take your insight and do something comparable? Good luck!
We've seen an explosion in time spent looking at second-hand information online in recent decades - social media & news. I think a healthier way is to get information direct from the source, and from going and doing things.
I think some people responded to the deluge of slop by clutching out their connection to reality and relying solely on a couple of third parties for their worldview.
There's no point in arguing with someone who looks at Elon Musk and cannot see success because they can only look at him through a thick lens of ideology and tribalism. Five, ten years ago, some these same people probably thought he was in their tribe and idolized him then. Ten years ago, they probably liked Trump and his shows too.
I think it's the other way around. My interlocutor above has a "thick lens of ideology and tribalism".
This is why they're being very unspecific and arguing like a child from a position of conviction, "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I've never had a keen eye to people that ride on the labour of other people and take credit for their work. Gossip magazines just don't work on me, and I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
> My interlocutor above has a "thick lens of ideology and tribalism". This is why they're being very unspecific and arguing like a child from a position of conviction, "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
There you go again, making up my back story despite having no idea who I am.
It is rude, but worse than that, a waste of words.
I would insert another whimsical parody, referring back to you, but that somehow threw you last time.
So I will just repeat:
> Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
> you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
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It isn't controversial, nor should it require a complex justification to say with some confidence, that the richest person on the planet has been "successful". Widely documented synonym: "prosperous", i.e. achieving great wealth.
>> "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I will be more precise and less rhetorical: based on the meanings of the words "successful", "prosperous" and "richest person on the planet" it is as close to a tautology as informal human language allows.
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> I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
"Progressive" doesn't mean charitable.
As has been pointed out to you already, reading and using words consistent with their widely documented meanings will help you communicate better, and communicate something coherent, beyond simply projecting strong dislike and distrust of Musk.
But, I am sympathetic to that viewpoint as was evident from my first comment.
Musk has not lived up to values he previously espoused. And he routinely demonstrates deep hypocrisy relative to principles he claims to value today.
> Douche
No accounting for taste
> born into ... wealth
It's a very minor thing in the big picture to be born into a 3rd world country like South Africa's top 1%.
> criminal wealth
His dad likely had some dodgy dealings, but there's every indication that he made the bulk of his money legally. Anyway, how does that reflect on Musk? Did we go back to "sins of the fathers"?
> organisations he ends up in needs to protect themselves from.
Ah yes, it's pure coincidence that so many of these organizations go on to absolutely kick ass. Let's check in on the EV situation at, say, GM or BMW in an alternate universe without Tesla. Or on the progress at ULA or Blue Origin.
> fascist
I don't think you understand what that word means. A key part of fascism is unlimited government control - the exact opposite of what he wants.
> grifter
He sells stuff? I guess that's bad in your eyes?
> who's entered into politics
How very dare he!?
> rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right,
Nice linking those three things together.
Apartheid was a crime. SA occupying and running mining operations in other countries was criminal. Profiting from it means you're accumulating criminal wealth.
Mistaking first-mover advantage and access to extreme amounts of funding for "kick ass" is quite weird.
No, that's not a characteristic of fascism. He's impressed by and promotes nazis, maintains his wealth through corporativism, and so on.
No, it's that he makes wild promises, takes money and then don't deliver on them that makes him a grifter.
Just going to drill into a couple of aspects of your rant.
First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his support of Trump and DOGE, we can conclude that he's the opposite of a fascist and wants to reduce the state. He's much more Millei than Mussolini. This is so elementary I'm a little confused as to why I have to spell it out.
Here's some more homework for you: [1]. Words like Nazi and Fascist and Communist have meanings. If we want to have a civilized society, we must first respect the meanings of words so that we can have a conversation.
Second: name a Nazi that Musk likes. Before you say Trump, here's Trump's Fine People speech. Watch the whole thing, then tell me he's a Nazi. Then also keep in mind the massive "Trump calls Nazis Fine People" hoax the media has been banging on about ever since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKbFA7HW-U
Here's one of him disavowing the KKK many times over a long period: https://x.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/897112536574828544
Third, Musk is known for making wild promises, many of which are as yet undone. Nobody would care who he is if that was all there is to him. But some of his wild promises are real and part of everyday life.
Fourth, if you think he wins due to extreme funding, go read the stories of Zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. All of the above teetered on the brink of nonexistence due to being bootstrapped by Musk who was then strapped for cash.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Fascism is a phase under capitalism where ideology breaks down and the people in power are split between going into hiding and panicked power grabs through any means available. Typically it involves ultra-nationalists taking formal political power and increasing the capitalist totalitarian impulse.
The state is much, much more "all-embracing" today than what Mussolini could ever have imagined, and has been for a long time, decades.
Musk wants a more total influence on the world, he doesn't want anyone to be able to say something negative about him, for example. He wants to eradicate large swathes of people, explicitly by making it impossible to talk about them and in practice it will likely boil down to the destruction of their bodies once that fails.
You're obviously sympathetic to this neo-fascist movement. Let's hope you'll manage to leave, because by now it looks like the resistance to it has to get violent.
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I'll consider setting up a terrarium but it'll take a month or two to get started. Where I live there is no grass outdoors at this time of year but I can probably find Festuca rubra seeds in the back of certain stores.
But they are better informed about and better placed to exploit the things that are profitable. The rest is just background noise.
My impression is that generally they surround themselves with people that are well informed and rely on them.
Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
> you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh"
But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
I mean, it's both right? It's easier to work on fixing policy if you're not a drug addict reading poisoned info.
Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so that putting the burden on the individual is made manageable.
To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
The individual solution is insufficient in this case. Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the level of population statistics, it means there's a systemic cause that's stronger than most people's willpower.
Society is flush with lots of drugs tobacco, alcohol, sugar, junk food, social media, reels... At society level, better laws and campaigns may work best but at individual level you'll get best ROI by focusing efforts on disciplining yourself and your family and friends.
My main point is there isn't some Illuminati with access to good info you can't get for free.
In the drug analogy I am saying most addicts know about rehab. The conspiricy isn't hiding all the NA groups.
You would have a better main point when you started to question how this accident could happen:
The problem is: we are naturally attracted to junk that tickles are emotional belief systems, for example some ideas we have about immigrants. It takes active THINKING to go against your gut feeling.How do you do that when you
You are proposing to bank on someone already deeply burdened by debt.I can't engage with this unless I talk politics... and my views (based on calling spades spades) wont be popular with anyone on any side ;). So will leave it there and say yes it is unfortunate.
r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
Funny typo in the subtitle.
> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
For me Guttenberg is an actor famous for Police Academy, Short Circuit, and Three Men And A Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg
His role in The Day After is the one that always stands out in my mind.
There’s also a confusing typo in “the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online”. I presume “gauze” was intended be “gaze”.
Why presume that? "Gauze" makes sense.
I read the sentence a couple of times to try to figure out what the phrase “ephemeral gauze” was intended to convey but failed to make sense of it. So, I figured that “gaze” may have been the intended word, i.e., readers pay particular attention to text while they’re in the process of reading it (gaze) but that it’s quickly forgotten when they move on to the next unrelated thing they see on the Internet (ephemerality).
I’m only familiar with gauze in the context of first-aid kits and other medical usage so I’d appreciate hearing your interpretation of “ephemeral gauze”.
As opposed to the solid materiality of books, the "material" of the internet is an "ephemeral gauze", a thin and shifting fabric (a mesh, literally a web) on which it would be impossible to apply ink, to hold rigid, etc.
Thanks. That makes sense.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gauzy definition 3
This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue.
I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain.
Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'.
When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.
The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to control their position. It has always been useful to control the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy us like music notes completing a chord progression. Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain compatibility. It just exists.
I recently read Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf, which makes many similar arguments, and found myself agreeing with this. I've been finding it harder and harder to lose myself in a book, to finish books, to read as I used to read. It's as if the lens through which I view reading and books has shifted - from a way to be thrust into another world, to something to be browsed in short, easy-to-read snippets, like social media but with things like covers and jackets and spines.
I'd also like to note that, while the printed book is certainly not perfect at staying through the ages - something like stone tablets are probably best for that - it's a lot more reliable than online things. Maybe that'll change, but for now, tech companies go out of business a lot more frequently than floods or fires or other disasters strike the average house. And while, if Simon and Schuster go out of business, that doesn't do a thing to the books you have purchased from them, if Amazon goes out of business, there's no guarantee any of your Kindle will be readable anymore.
I envision that meme of having large bookshelves filled with books, something I could show off to friends as a proof that there is still plenty to be found in books, that I've found valuable in books. That on some days I might take the time to sit down, brew some tea or something, and read a book.
>The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
This quote is great! Where is it from?
The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb, Introduction to Part 1
The content committed to print needs to be worth it. I'm a fan of old-school sci-fi, the kind that asks how technology might enhance or undermine the human experience and how that might change, collapse, or raise society to new heights. Right now, the entire genre is in trough of unimaginative, vacuous current-day allegory. Most published work is entirely wrapped up in gender, sex, race, and labor politics. Everything is a stand-in for current political movements and figures, where the setting may as well be set-dressing. No curiosity, no prescience, no fundamental philosophical questioning.
My only reprieve is that sci-fi short story omnibuses contain maybe 20-30% true sci-fi that's exactly what I'm searching for. But buying a print novel off the shelf got to the point where it was wasting my money. And I can only re-read the classics so much.
Waiting for the "sci-fi was always current-day allegory!" sophomorists to flood the comments.
Sci-fi was always a current-day allegory. That's why I prefer cyberpunk: rather than allegorical, it tries to be literal and concrete.
But cyberpunk is not imaginative in the way you're looking for. I can appreciate that.
What are some examples of the old-school, non-allegorical stuff? Maybe Exhalation?
I agree with two major issues raised here. Importance of reading long form content and harms of environment full of distractions.
Saying that solution is not turning back and giving up on digital. It would be same as giving up on printing to embrace a teacher focused learning.
Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with: "Use decent software. And make copies."
And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?
I think the author would say that certain forms of content, like blogs, can be useful. I don't think they're completely eschewing digital reading, but instead pushing for far more print reading than is common now. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.
Disclosure: I worked on developing smartboard technology for students in my country.
Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?
There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.
I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.
From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.
If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.
The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.
How come the only person who can ever seem to find conclusive research of this is Haidt? He really must head and shoulders above the lazy people in this field.
The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done
Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?
From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/m...
Sorry, I'll be using my lazy card here and give a concise answer, which you can extrapolate to find the answers to all of your questions.
PISA is a standardized test conducted by OECD for International Student Assessment. It's homepage is located at [0], alongside with datasets for all previous tests, and plethora of material.
So, you can download the data, look at the questions in any language you prefer, do your own analysis.
I'll just reiterate that, my personal experience mirrors the article. Extreme reliance of smart devices and technologies like conversational LLMs reduce the cognitive ability and deep thinking capacity tremendously. Children and people become interfaces to these devices they use. They just delegate all their thinking to these devices and live a much hollower life.
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/pisa.html
That's why I'm excited about the new batch of PineNote devices, e-readers running Linux with a custom GNOME theme and a passive stylus.
And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper. Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be a good enough compromise.
I exclusively use fountain pens and higher quality wirebound notebooks and notepads.
I number the notebook, and write the start date at first page. Then I number the pages as I go, and date every page.
When the notebook finishes, I remove the binding, scan it at 600DPI, store it as a PDF.
I'll be training a local Tesseract installation with my hand writing one day, but I'm not there. However, these notebooks saved the day more than once in their current form.
I'm using smart devices since Palm/Handspring era. Nothing can replace the paper for me, and I don't want to change my ways from now on. So this is the method I use for quite some time.
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The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.
The point these focus-deprived children could accurately make is that our adult world is also about reward hacking and bullshit metrics. I’m old but I will tell you that everything I dislike that I see in the young is society’s fault. We did a truly terrible job of giving them a world in which to become better, rather than worse, people.
In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.
Kids see adults who don't read so why should they?
It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to become successful because nobody has the reading or concentration skills. When I was a child I taught myself English by playing Planescape Torment.
My kids convinced me to try out a couple of those old final fantasy games from the 90s. As someone who studied Kabbalah I was intrigued by the fact that they named a character Sephiroth, although the character really had nothing to do with the name or concept. Anyway, I was already old so I didn’t have the same emotional connection (except when that girl was killed) because neither the writing nor the realism was at a level I hadn’t seen before. It definitely would have hit me hard at 13, though. Really hard.
Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.
The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.
Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
Funny that. I'm part of the generation really hit by FF7, and it was indeed quite memorable. I have plenty of memorable books read around the same era too. Also... I guess 'writing' in video games covers a lot more than just words.
Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
I often find the voice acting to be interminably slow and distracting and immersion breaking somehow. You are just waiting for the voice actor to slowly emote it all. I like how Morrowind did it when questing. Some flavor voice to set the mood and then great writing you read. Full voice acting for important parts and scenes.
I also see that in real world too. Too many times I wished a book existed to learn this or that and got an answer that you really need to hang out in multiple Discord groups to stay up-to-date. Newer generation apparently has less difficulty with that.
Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that theoretical education leaves open.
Maybe they just think they do because they don't know any better?
Or constant stream of information gives them the illusion of staying informed
I don't think it's an illusion. There are enough talented young engineers
Yeah. I struggle to understand how podcasts and youtube are an efficient learning resource. They are slow, unstructured, and unsearchable. Whilst some software can ameliorate some of these (e.g. playback speed control), there's no analogue to the process of "can skip this paragraph, can skip this paragraph, let's search back for the definition of this term, let's cross-reference this term with this other text, let's see how many pages are left in this chapter...".
I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of everything having to be a video. I can read much-much faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow. So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10 minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to smash that bell because it helps me so much"...
</old man yells at cloud>
Not only written text is a faster way to communicate information, it is so because it has much bigger context window:
"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.
"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.
In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.
There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.
It's not about being old fashioned. If you can't maintain focus to read a book, you're obviously not truly engaging with the material. How far are you going to get in a field, if you're reliant on having everything explained to you in simple terms.
Hear! hear!
The good thing about videos is that you can literally see somebody doing something from end tonend
Not just the critical part described in an article
Surely an article can cover a process end-to-end, just as a video can focus on only a critical part. Do you mean that the medium of video encourages the author to be more thorough?
Sometimes I like to watch how someone does something cuz you can see interesting things
E.g watching developer write software can show you things about OS usage, IDE usage, automation and other tricks and habbits
That's fair. Someone commented in a different fork that videos are good for DIY jobs, and I totally agree. You want to see a person doing it live, so you can imitate their motions. I was thinking about learning something theoretical, like mathematics or history.
From my experience it is obviously the latter. Reading well, on paper or on screen, really requires you to put your complete attention to it. Audio (podcasts) and video (youtube) have the advantage of not requiring your complete attention. Everything else follows from that. Of course it can fit some people better. Just not where it matters.
There’s no such thing as multitasking. It is a literal illusion and is one big reason why people who can’t sit down and actually read a book (or lie down with eyes closed and LISTEN to a podcast/lecture) produce for themselves the illusion of understanding.
And then you realize you weren't paying attention and have to skip back several minutes. (Which can happen with a book too !)
Also, "podcasts" go quite a bit back : since it became practical to record radio (wire already, or did that only start with cassette tapes ?)
TV got that too with it's own tapes, but the portability and diversity was much worse until digital video got cheap enough.
I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes.
When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.
Isn't it also because of a change in testing methods? It seems to me that multiple choice tests are more and more widespread. These can be gamed more easily, since you can often eliminate some of the choices based on knowledge unrelated to the correct answer.
For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test ever. Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe. Everything was problems, proofs, or essays.
Yes it was uncommon for me too. Our teacher in electronics back then did give us a multiple choice test because we asked so persistently. He wanted proof for why the option was chosen though. I thought he was just taking the piss but for one answer I could use proof by elimination and he accepted that. That proof was probably more work than just adding up a bunch of resistors, but it was also more fun :-)
I haven't seen an increase in multiple choice tests in my area (mathematics). We still require written answers and proofs. Some testing is computer-based but it requires entry of formulated results properly.
Really I spend my days shovelling PDFs around.
I find three challenges with YouTube and podcasts:
1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.
2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.
3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.
YouTube and podcasts are fine as an introduction to a topic, but they are and do encourage passive consumption. It's fine for reciting shallow factoids in class and getting grades, but won't make you an expert in a field. If you can't maintain enough attention to read, you'll always have to rely on processed, second hand information. That's why reading needs to be taught as a skill, and heavily encouraged.
Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books
The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll eventually reach a point where you need information that is only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.
There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about how a record number of university students in Sweden are struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of reading and extracting the necessary information needed from the textbooks.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life
That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.
It's sad on the human level too. A family member or friend may have a difficult issue that takes more than 2 minutes to discuss, but a person won't have the attention span to listen.
No wonder therapists are raking it in and short supply.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades
Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?
Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.
When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.
Remember when films used to be a tight 90 minutes of snappy editing. Now everything is getting close to 3 hours, it's not because the stories are better or more complex it's people not being ruthless in their editing.
I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing words.
Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to focus their effort.
That is very true, although I also have the opposite example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one for calculus) were so dense with information that I could not make head and tails
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
> Students who use ChatGPT ... to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated ...
Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your observations of your younger relatives?
Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years spent mastering' with LLMs.
> Times have changed.
Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.
> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].
Proof needed. You can't just say that.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.
The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.
And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.
> ...secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago.
On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation, because more than just the test has changed since that time. For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are the present-day students being taught to a test from four decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would need to control for in order to accurately compare performance over time. Although there are certainly people who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance. What do people need to know now, and what books should be read by students in order to learn it?
> secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago
But can pupils from 30 or 40 years ago pass today's exams?
I actually did a few math exams recently (I was helping someone study for them), and they were really too easy. I had a hard time catching up with uni maths after breezing through secondary school, but if they nowadays enter with that level, it must be a nightmare.
Interesting but that's still not a totally fair comparison because the you of 30 years ago might have found them harder.
Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more efficient to build a high level map of the subject using podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and the end result is the same.
Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.
Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...
I think it is two-sided.
The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.
The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.
I don't see any serious "right way" as you describe it. In particular I don't see a lot of motivation from social groups, and the Internet is horrible for good feedback because lots of people respond to things from a purely emotional place.
For instance, if you want to use the internet to get ahead of your curriculum, you can watch Khan Academy videos and do exercises. Not all that different from doing the same with a book, but with the internet you get a lot of curated material for free.
You can connect with other learners, you can ask questions on forums.
They get excellent grades because they make sure the professor feels that they agree with them on political and ideological issues. Be a nice and friendly person, and agree with the academics on their political beliefs and you will get good grades. Knowledge has nothing to do with academic grades.
You could as well have written that you know young people who get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their school papers.
> extracting information
> excellent grades
have nothing to do with interiority -- the main thrust of the article
What will they do when there isn't a podcast or video to teach them a concept?
I don’t think ChatGPT belongs with the other two. It essentially counts as reading.
Grades are irrelevant
We all know students with good grades who struggle at exams
I think it’s far too early to state that with any confidence.
Every time I read about the next generation not being able to read, I recall all the boomers falling for penis enlargement pill scams again and again. Exactly the people who complain about standard tests being too easy nowadays are the people who panic at the sight of a self-checkout.
Seeking out just other viewpoints that agree only with you and your initial beliefs, usually by people grifting and making money of of having said viewpoints is definitely much worse and not at all what “educated” means.
Keep in mind that some of the criteria have changed as well over time, probably not as fast as technology itself, but skills like reading comprehension are tested for less in favor of e.g. tech literacy.
Internet is a faster printing press therefore more people can be subjected to more lies than before, but the issue at hand, the one mentioned in Sagan's quote, is orthogonal to that question and predates it. Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions?
Can printed books save us?
I admit I oftentime rejoice that printing felt out of fashion, so the printed books that are left are saved from the progress of psyops and the invasion of AI, which may make it easier for future generation(s?) to see through the blindfold of fantasies that will be setup for them.
The article site 1984 as an illustration of how printed books can help resist surveillance. Well, it did not turn out that great for the main character of that book.
Books are a sedative not a cure.
> Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions?
That's a great question.
The answer is very well known. It started both.
The Ottoman sultans saw those wars and banned the press. The missed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and eventually disappeared.
They were also a bit far from the Americas, which might have contributed to the economic boom of Europe more than the faster spreading of new ideas via books, no?
The kind of colonization that happened in America also happened in several other places, again and again, through history. In no other case is was followed by an industrial revolution.
In fact, China was just fading away from a very similar boom when Europe started expanding. And the Otomans have had their own boom some centuries before.
And China did develop a mechanical press, and decided to control an censor it too. But I don't think the GP is correct on using that as a strong cause.
I'm not talking about wealth per se, but industrialization. Without it, they failed to develop adequate military technology, transportation infrastructure, and agricultural efficiency to free up labor for industrial work. They also lacked coal reserves, and oil was not be a factor until too late in the game.
Quote of the day.
What I found particularly disturbing about this was that I had to swipe away two pop ups and a lower banner just to start reading. All the while my subconscious was asking if I would like to just pick up a book. Then I got distracted by an ad for another article on the right of the screen. .
Someone mentions Postman below so I'm tempted to add: can the tech crowd try a bit of Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Mark Fisher, Marhsall McLuhan, presumably loads of others I don't know about who have done work in these areas, and then maybe Michel Desmurget on the more science-based side of it if they want to avoid any airy-fairy theory.
It's arguably especially wild that Desmurget doesn't get a mention in these discussions. Or, I mean, it would be wild in a world where there was a smooth and effortless flow of good ideas and arguments between people, maybe over some sort of transcontinental network...
A lot of the topics that people have opinions about when it comes to screens and devices and health and etc have loads of studies on them. Which doesn't mean that everything is all solved, there are unexplored and uncertain areas, but reading these discussions you'd think there was no data out there whatsoever. There's tons!
It doesn't mean either that people can't enjoy sharing opinions, some of the anecdotes are interesting and insightful, but there seems to be a few obvious arguments which are basically non-arguments that get trotted out, and which seem to be hindering a more fruitful discussion.
How many times have we seen someone make a point about the bad type of screen-use for someone to say: "yeah, but I use ________ like _________." or "yeah, but when you read books you're being antisocial as well." and so on. The research on the topic distinguishes carefully between the different types of use! Etc etc, I could go on.
This comment is intended constructively
Wanted to add Marshal McLuhan impulsively upthreads, but restrained myself, and read everything else first. Have something to amend your list with, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann
Tech employees don’t engage constructively with tech criticism because of self interest.
I implore everyone reading this to google the Sokal hoax before decide whether these guys are worthwhile.
Michel Desmurget is a well-respected neuroscientist working in research in France, so the Sokal thing is totally irrelevant to him, presumably? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Desmurget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair - for the curious.
The Sokal affair is a funny thing yes, which I'd seen before (and I presume many people here are familiar with). I don't see how it's relevant here?
I mean - it was one journal, in 1996, that had no peer review process, that published a fake article someone sent in to prove a point that the journal publishes at least some crap...
What should we reject based on that in your opinion - all cultural and media studies presumably, at the very least, you seem to be clearly suggesting. And every philosopher too? The logicians? The linguists? All of social science? Economics too? Is it just STEM-type stuff that's acceptable then?
Seems preposterous to me. The soft sciences are looser, and definitely have a higher proportion of hand-wavy nonsense, but rejecting it all to avoid stuff you don't like is just silly. Learning to avoid the crap and find the good stuff is pretty similar to other fields.
And often, anecdotally, it seems to me that the more interesting figures in the experimental sciences tend to be very intrigued by the softer, arguably sometimes "trickier" questions that the non-STEM sciences can explore.
Any of them ran their own startups? Ported some code to jemalloc?
Then I am not interested in their idea on tech.
Wow, there you go. This is quite the straightforwardly authoritarian statement, if followed through on (though I doubt you actually follow it through).
If some politicians and engineers wanted to lay train tracks down straight through the middle of a town, would the locals have a say in the matter, in your opinion? Or should they leave those decisions to the experts?
I do imagine you're not really serious though. To illustrate that - let's imagine for the sake of argument that Julian Assange (or Richard Stallman, or Kent Pitman, or whoever whose political opinions you might dislike) would code rings around you.
Would you suddenly take their opinion seriously? You wouldn't, if you didn't like them or their opinions. You'd come up with some other ad hoc reason why they could (and must!) be totally ignored. I mean, please correct me if I'm wrong here.
So why maintain the pretense that you're rejecting these people because they're not a part of the coding tribe, of which you're such a proud member and staunch representative?
You are reading too much into it. I am simply unwilling to listen anymore to the commentariat (roughly those working at newspapers, think tanks and/or having degrees in political science, media, communications, or sociology) attacking tech. It has become a tribal issue where political hay is being made and politics drags all debates down to mudslinging.
In short: Talk is cheap, I want to see that they have also done the legwork. That the issues is based on actual facts, and that it comes from a genuine desire to know and solve a problem.
The issue isn't about "screen vs. print", the issue is about "critical, discerning, questioning mind" vs. "mindless consumerism".
The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers.
It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior.
And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1].
[1]: https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-pr...
I think it's much more fundamental than this; the new speed and new methods with which information can be spread are themselves the problem. Misinformation is downstream of this. The more fundamental problem seems to be tribalism, which sort of information can be spread quickly, (anything with strong emotional content, outrage, etc.) and the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding. (eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round? Or, do they know the earth is round because this is what they've been taught. I'll bet most of HN does understand this, but most people could no produce this if asked without any sort of preparation.)
The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.
> eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round?
During the "there are flat-earthers" fad I realized that for the majority of people it doesn't matter whether it's flat or not, the question whether it's flat or round actually only arises when they need to perform an action which depends on the Earth's shape, which is never, because most people are not pilots, not astronauts, etc., so for them, the model of Earth being flat works perfectly well.
It's the same as people saying that Earth is round for most intents and purposes, and then a smart-ass saying "actually, it's not a perfectly round ball". Yes, it's not a perfectly round ball, but we're discussing time zones here, not local weather patterns.
Most people say that Earth is round not because they believe it's the correct model for their use case, but because they want to belong to the club of people perceived as smart, and that's the view expected of a "smart" person. The flat-earthers perfectly uncovered this charade, by showing that most people just parrot "Earth is round" because that's the social consensus which just so happens to be true.
> the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding
This hits the nail on the head. In the end, I am trusting other people to do the experiments and reporting the findings.
I can regurgitate a lot of stuff about science, but in the end I believe it because I grew on the scientist side of the fence. If you look at conspiracy theories, the thing they always do is come up with a reason not to believe in the established authorities.
This article is too long, I will let NotebookLM make a fake podcast out of it
Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913 dictionary. Best of all, I can prop up my tablet on the elliptical trainer and read for an hour while my heart rate moves through the first four zones as increasing amounts of oxygenated blood rush through my brain causing the words to burn like fire in my mind.
Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper.
[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch
[1]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/middlemarch.png
[2]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin.jpg
This. I couldn’t agree more. The text is searchable, indexable, word definitions can be searched right within the text, highlights are saved and indexable, etc.
Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.
Reading great books has been one of the best experiences of my life. But even as an ardent bibliophile, I can't deny that the medium has several serious shortcomings. Books are often far too long. Their quality is uneven (anyone remember the Wheel of Time series?). In the modern era, the production, marketing, promotion, and review of books has become highly politicized. Internet text - blogs, tweets, etc - has the potential to repair these issues.
I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records.
In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year.
Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
> Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.
[0] http://www.alpinist.com/ [1] https://www.surfersjournal.com/
Totally agree! I subscribe to one magazine which is published once a quarter, it costs me about $40/year for the subscription but is well worth it to me as the content is not available anywhere else. Definitely a niche market but the rag does a very good job of catering exactly to its market. There’s still some ads but only a handful per issue that normally has 60-100 pages total.
We still get Architectural Digest and I enjoy looking at it in a way I never would online.
“when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
> Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when the conventionally powerful people own the content producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not simple at all, who to listen to.
this type of situation is not unique in human history - it happens after the invention of any device that disseminates information on a mass scale. for example, see the printing press:
> The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the past when faced with this problem.
I think the Internet medium is sufficiently different from past advancements that such analogies don't work. It's not necessarily that the Internet brings fundamentally different capabilities, perhaps we can reason about how its new scale makes some capabilities emerge as others, but it's the same outcome either way.
What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow readers.
I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows you to context switch to a million different things, and even an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work.
There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours to the library/store to return the old one and download a new one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero, you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you took the time to pick out.
That's true too. Both costs matter.
> Only selected few buy books, because it costs money
I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)
Writing digitally is cheaper but that's exactly why distributing or getting reach is not cheap at all. You still need cost and proof of work in getting noticed by algorithms, as well as people who usually set trends. In fact, the lower cost of production means that more niche things get written than there would have been a market for.
There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a crisis don’t have a principled argument as to how things are worse.
I frequently hear there are more lies and they spread even faster in 2024 than 2014 and for sure faster than 1994.
But surely there are also more truths, and they spread faster than ever before? The amount of lies has increased but so has the amount of information in general, any question you have can be answered within 10 seconds.
The irony of reading this article surrounded by a cacophony of flashing and scrolling ads is not lost on me.
IIRC one of the common factor with genius/prodigies of yesteryears is they all worked 1:1 or in a small group with some reasonably talented teachers. Unfortunately that is not scalable for mass, so may be custom designed Device + LLM may work better than giving up digital.
Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in a class full of kids much smarter than me.
As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).
Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often.
The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.
I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.
> "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
That seems a bit wasteful? Any time you want to read a new book you buy a whole new reading device? It might be cheap but that's more e-waste we don't need.
Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card? You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading experience can then be totally offline as you describe.
> It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
Oh no, that’s just… why?
At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.
I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
I think the main issue with this line of reasoning is that before all of these internet based forms of content, did many people actually read literature, like is mentioned in the article? I am not sure, but I would expect that the books that were read were probably not some high form of art but entertainment - which is fine of course, and it is different to a large extent from scrolling tiktok, but does it like up with the authors thesis about reading providing some deeper form of enlightenment? Maybe it still does, since it's still the same act of reading, but maybe not as much, since it's not normal "intellectual content"
> “Wen Stephenson at the Chicago Review claimed […] he experienced no difference in parsing Seamus Heaney on the page as opposed to the screen, asking “does it matter that it is transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? …the question is beginning to bore me by now.”
Well said. For the act of reading digital origin changes the quality but only in minor ways. What we all failed to anticipate we’re the gross effects of segmentation, disintegration, infinite duplication of media.
The reason for epistemological collapse is that people peeked behind the curtain and found that the experts were just normal people endowed not with some magical knowledge but just making things up as they go.
I can do that, too, and sometimes I am better at it. Given that, I prefer reader-side filtering over writer-side filtering.
The title seems to make the incorrect assumption that print (ink on paper) is the only way to read.
I'm skeptical there is any epistemological collapse. Checking Wikipedia because I'm rusty on that stuff, it has epistemology as "the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge." As someone old enough to have been reading paper books pre internet I don't think that's collapsed at all. The very fact that I can look it up on Wikipedia and reference Reddit is a step forward.
The article reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes 'Academia here I come' (Reddit reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...)
Boring article. How does it go from blaming computers in general and then just picking on Twitter and Reddit - as if these two websites are representative of everything a computer is used for.
Ed Simon's reflection on Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies in In Praise of Print thoughtfully challenges the prevailing assumption that digital media will inevitably replace print.
>> Mine is an estimably materialist variety of mysticism though,
Esteemed by whom?
This is a frustratingly bad article.
The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable, and not the content.
This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books. It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet.
The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed.
Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed out how long form content trains concentration, short and long term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.
Perhaps the author doesn't make the case well, but the implication is that reading print primes the mind in a way that presents better emotional and intellectual consumption of the content.
The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.
I went and checked the page in another browser with my adblocker off. Wow. Just wow. I started using ad blockers on everything a few years ago because they became a little too annoying. I somehow missed when the web became nigh unusable from them.
The irony is that even the ads on the site are so terrible they take a good 30 seconds to fully load.
When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like it did with an adblocker on, but eventually: https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm
Oh gosh you are right. I turned off the adblocker to check it out. I often kind of forget the adblock-less world is out there.
I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked the link.
I disabled brave shields for a moment and wow. Especially the youtube-like iframe that slid in from the right. Crazy.
We really fucked up when we didn’t regulate smart phones like weapons grade uranium.
It’s so fucking toxic. And I’m well aware there are gems in the museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers of gift shop TikTok shit (and it’s plausible that YouTube will be Alphabet’s undoing because YouTube is great for education and a well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a dockyard crane).
Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low capital gains are rape) can’t cope: it’s no longer just implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis, society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a successful match “churn”, and just every godawful thing.
The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for the “best version of the argument”.
Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form in charge of anything worth a billion dollars.
There are gems, it’s not all garbage, but if every smartphone on the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis.
And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP astrology says things are.
How do e-readers fit in here?
A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and physical destruction.
Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?
> an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction
Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth.
That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed.
https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...
Haven't read the article but this just sparked a thought that this is similar to email spam: given there's cost to printing you'd expect higher quality. Of course there are still bad actors and the deluded unfortunately.
When you live in a society that no longer values knowledge or compassion, there’s no point is wasting your time trying to go back to the old golden years. Maybe just accept anti intellectualism is the only way to succeed in the world and work around that? Elon Musk, the most successful man in the world is anti intellectual, why would you fool yourself into thinking there might be another future?
> Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism.
Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.
>“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,”
This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged.
So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms.
Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
>Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.
Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise.
But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like:
>The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
[1] https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-li...
That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
> all produced information is unavoidably narrativization
This is a future possibility but it has not yet come to pass, and we can still avoid it. We are not yet adrift in a sea of epistemological relativism where everyone has their own truth, and no objective truth can be discerned. We don't need to succumb to this kind of nihilism. Truth and objective reality are still discernable and approachable. Philosophical objections to the Truly objective viewpoint are not the limiting factor.
"Everything is just a narrative" is the cry of those who don't have truth on their side. The current state of mass media is the result of their cries becoming louder. We don't have to go along with it.
I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment.
Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.
I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons.
So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.
This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep.
You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.
> Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read.
I think you may be on to something, but I would also add that maybe you should consider whether prior to the age of 13 may also be a viable range. I think 13 to it depends is when the problem (roughly, the mind/ego "coming into its own", or something like that) manifests.
Disagree about the age threshold on epistemology. Being introduced to Hume in my teenage years is what got me to repeatedly revisit and reconsider old ideas, and look for new ones in much the way you describe. Human mental life & development isn't so simple as arbitrary age boundaries and specific, fixed learning environments.
Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points, benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem.
This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon, and see that as something that sets you free and puts the onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight into flimsy pseudo-certainty.
It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing books like that, they were accused by more conservative contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it as something to celebrate and explore.
We presume that it is us who have digested the thinness of the veil of reality who should be deciding epistemological questions but it is the younger generations who have grown up in this environment of 'Hacking the Matrix' who have the moral right to do it.
I'm all for that. Sounds great.
I very well might be wrong. I hope I am, since I can't of any other way to make things work.
The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
> you can't live like that
Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the individual, it undermines all social institutions.
A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth, veracity.
Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it - rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less "unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do you really know about the relation between an LED and covert surveillance.
In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge and maybe to use it in a different way.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-its-ca...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259278
>You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with the corpus of works.
In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the next 6 months.
Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to all the journals legally unlike the average person.
If one is able to be comfortable with the unknown (a state that can't be escaped except through a simulation), checking everything isn't required.
It's like juggling three balls in a way: if you can't do it, it isn't necessary to believe you can. So too with knowledge, except it's like a thousand times as hard.
The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.
I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language. Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a higher standard in a piece about literature and written media and books.
Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.
Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.
Also it's kind of hard to find definite statements to agree or disagree with. I mean it's all like "the arc of the moral universe had turned in part because of the supposedly liberatory power of technology". What does that actually mean? What is the arc of the moral universe? Which way did it turn? I wasn't aware it actually had an arc.
Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.
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I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers: git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)
I can’t help but imagine some of the folks this message is referring to as “needing to read more” seeing this and dismissing it as using language of “the elites”. There’s a certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.
Which of those references are obscure?
I put random paragraphs into a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level assessment calculator, which suggests the US school grade level required to understand the assessed text. It consistently returned between Grade 8 and 9.
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It's for people that read books and have done so for a long time. That's all it takes to appreciate it, you really don't need to be a scholar.
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