What's happening to reading?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/whats-happening-to-reading

by Kaibeezy • 1 year ago

183 319 1 year ago

Kaibeezy2• 1 year ago

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read.

Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.

genewitch2• 1 year ago

there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember.

I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

For me chat with a paragraph in a language I sorta know (Japanese) or wish I knew (Chinese) is really useful. I ask for a translation and see discordances with what I can read and ask about them and get good answers. I also can lean on translations from my text and insist that certain words get used, etc.

vjvjvjvjghv2• 1 year ago

They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.

kqr• 1 year ago

I have no idea how it worked.

I traced down this through an academic article which favourably compared it to other summarising solutions back in 2006. It might help answer the question: https://web.archive.org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copern...

xphilter2• 1 year ago

I can’t read it (lol) due to paywall, but 100% it’s because we stopped teaching kids how to read. But good luck trying to hold public schools accountable! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/readin...

nottorp• 1 year ago

The article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even before "AI".

Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...

easterncalculus8• 1 year ago

Sorry but if we can't correlate learning to read with literacy we're not allowed to correlate anything at all. Comprehension is massive and the difference between college and 6th great reading comprehension is an ocean that influences whether people pick anything up or pass it to ChatGPT.

bee_rider5• 1 year ago

Oh dang, we were all worried about time traveling AI, right?

xphilter2• 1 year ago

Right. But you don’t think the giant education gap right before AI isn’t the primary reason?

niux• 1 year ago

Just install Bypass Paywalls Clean extension. This is the author: https://x.com/Magnolia1234B

coliveira3• 1 year ago

Agreed that society deciding to "educate" children with iPads instead of books would lead to unforeseen consequences for their cognitive skills.

micromacrofoot2• 1 year ago

I don't know, maybe putting a paygate in front of every piece of substantive editorial content isn't helping.

profunctor• 1 year ago

How do you expect them to make a living? News and magazines were always behind a paygate.

micromacrofoot2• 1 year ago

I'd be a lot more likely to pay if they didn't do everything possible to make the experience unpleasant.

Even if you pay you still get served ads, bombarded with trackers, and half the time publications make unsubscribing incredibly hostile (if not impossible online).

It's no wonder half the population gets their news solely from reshared headlines on social media.

thepryz• 1 year ago

I haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story available to listen to instead.

floatingtorch• 1 year ago

In the age of LLMs vacuuming up all content and deriving all the economic value from it, can you blame them?

mNovak• 1 year ago

Sites like the New Yorker have had pay walls since before LLMs entered the scene, and moreover they purposely make their content available freely to those web crawlers that are supposedly robbing them (hence why archive links work).

cantor_S_drug• 1 year ago

There are few youtube channels where host reads lot of publications on a particular current topic and gives his opinion summarizing the articles. This way news publications don't get monetary benefits but the youtube channel does. People who are just lazy to read will invariably gravitate to such methods of consuming news. I remember there was an article where one account was shared among the whole institution. It's exactly that but at a much wider scale. I expect crack down on fair use by such publications on those news channel.

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

I don't see how they can crack down on this. Summaries don't infringe copyright, from what I can tell.

coliveira3• 1 year ago

I don't blame these people. I like to read things that matter; but reading news, especially the way they're badly written these days, is better avoided.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

This article, and the New Yorker in general, seem like a good reason why people aren't reading.

If you want to KNOW "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever.

If, instead, you want to READ ABOUT "What's Happening to Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you.

Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy or artificially busy with social media and other things that aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.

contagiousflow• 1 year ago

I don't think you read the article at all...

easterncalculus8• 1 year ago

  One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.

WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.

bmiekre2• 1 year ago

This gave a literal LOL

easterncalculus8• 1 year ago

I definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets worse too.

“Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”

Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.

jasonthorsness2• 1 year ago

“A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.”

Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP

anzumitsu2• 1 year ago

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

andrepd• 1 year ago

Lmao, this is the "swimming through molasses"? We're done for.

I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs are on their way to destroy what's left.

AlanYx• 1 year ago

There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part, that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded, circuitous style of the court.

anzumitsu2• 1 year ago

Have you read the passage in question? While I would expect English students to be able to work through it it’s not an easy task and would almost certainly require some kind of reference for the anachronistic terms and historical context (which, admittedly, I think the students in the study were allowed, though few took advantage of it).

haiku20772• 1 year ago

Someone posted it below and it doesn't seem that difficult. One old use of the word "wonderful" was all that threw me off

neuroplots• 1 year ago

Even worse, there are a lot of writers I know who go through the publishing process and the first person to actually read the manuscript is the copy editor. You’d think people in publishing read, but no…

A landmark study of this, pertaining to literary agents, was just published today: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/literary-agents-dont-read-h...

troad• 1 year ago

Strong agree, and honestly I'm kind of shocked.

If an adult English speaker cannot understand the opening of Bleak House - quotes given elsewhere in this thread - they are effectively unable to access the bulk of English literature.

This is not someone who belongs in a university English course, this is someone in need of remedial English lessons.

Spivak2• 1 year ago

It really is, students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English that they don't read, write, or speak; that makes reference and uses turns of phrase that would be well-understood by readers at the time but are archaic to a modern reader.

If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the results would be perfectly acceptable. Why would you test literacy, a very practical skill, using anything other than contemporary language, the kind that they actually use in their day to day?

KPGv26• 1 year ago

students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English

They were asked to read the opening chapter of Bleak House. It's pretty much standard English.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln�s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes � gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

The only word I see there that isn't used the same way in bog standard American English is "wonderful." I will grant you that "Michaelmas" is obscure to an American, but "Michaelmas Term [] over" is clear enough: it's a specific span of time that has elapsed. You don't need to know exactly what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is any more than if you read

I went to Carnegie Deli

and didn't know what Carnigie Deli is. It's obviously a deli.

jihadjihad4• 1 year ago

Why would you test literacy

To clarify, the study [0] mentioned in TFA and referenced by GP did not test literacy in the sense, "can this person read English?" Rather, it tested whether students had attained a level of "proficient-prose literacy," which equates to a score of 33+ on the Reading portion of the ACT.

A 33 on the ACT is a very good score (it's out of 36). The students were English majors, so it does not seem unreasonable to test whether they are proficient in this area. What exactly is the expectation when they pick up King Lear, or The Canterbury Tales?

0: https://archive.ph/Cp0rS

easterncalculus8• 1 year ago

This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characters do, which isn't true either. They had trouble then too, but (fewer) people could still do it. Now it's a stone wall.

Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.

jihadjihad4• 1 year ago

Wait until they encounter Shakespeare!

jihadjihad4• 1 year ago

It reminds me of the now-infamous article that ran in the New York Times a few years ago that argued we should remove the requirement to complete an Algebra course in order to earn a high school diploma.

The bar for any amount of academic discipline or rigor may as well be a stripe of masking tape on the floor.

allturtles4• 1 year ago

Not just university students, but English majors [0].

[0] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346

It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."

jihadjihad4• 1 year ago

To add to the depression, I wonder how many respondents thought that "nineteenth century" == 1900s.

easterncalculus8• 1 year ago

Yep, English majors, and on top of that the study was done in 2015, which is not just pre-ChatGPT but pre-TikTok.

bee_rider5• 1 year ago

I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers, and my list will quickly start to include folks who are more mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage that we literally use equations named after these guys!

Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.

aorist• 1 year ago

This study can't see past its own midwit view that there is an objective “detailed, literal” reading that necessarily produces the same interpretation of the text that the authors have.

The students in the study are responding in a rational way to the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their own work[^1]. The real task is then to flatter the teacher/professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work — and if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective, why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?

This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself: - one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs lumbering around London", because the authors think this language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced, there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or making fun of) that idea? - the authors criticize readers for relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other texts, especially old ones — does pulling from those make you a bad reader? - they say that a student only locates the fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than shipyards?)

I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text itself. But by the points students are in college they will have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal interpretations that don't produce the required result, and unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.

[^0] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-... [^1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...

watwut4• 1 year ago

To be fair, the opening is exactly the sort of clunky writing paragraph that you can normally feel free to skip.

ofalkaed• 1 year ago

They were not asked to read a book, they were asked to read 7 paragraphs aloud and then answer questions about it. It would have been nice if the study had a control group of students who sat down and read the same passage to themselves, we interpret for different things when reading aloud and we have no idea how that affected the study but for the study's purpose of highlighting issues with teaching (not proving students are illiterate) the lack of this control group is not a huge issue.

English students are students, they are in school to learn things they don't know, not demonstrate what they already know. Looking at the numbers it goes from 0% proficient as freshman to 50% as juniors, drops with seniors but seniors often seem to be an outlier in these sorts of studies, probably because they have a great deal on their mind with the major changes their life is about to undergo.

bmiekre2• 1 year ago

retskrad• 1 year ago

Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.

chrisweekly• 1 year ago

Your comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're willing to share.

edavison1• 1 year ago

I don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.

debesyla• 1 year ago

I wonder how can one even calculate time spent reading in hours. Most of reading is, after all, thinking (and reminiscing) about what you read...

I think maybe OP was using some obscure meme format. Or if it was genuine I am also interested how did the 500 hours came upon.

Der_Einzige2• 1 year ago

It's trivial to get an LLM to write a comment of this kind of quality. Good writing means nothing anymore.

sandy_coyote• 1 year ago

Despite this comment's dubiety, this is a good point. Text communication is only about 8,000 years old IIRC, which is quite recent in human development.

B1FF_PSUVM4• 1 year ago

You can knock off a few millennia there, and if you want to include most of the population, barely a century or two.

Literacy was needed to read the Bible and operate machinery, and now we have videos for that. Only (some of) the video makers need to read, so they can raid the libraries for material.

kjkjadksj• 1 year ago

Now ask how old working a sedentary 9-5 is

MichaelRo2• 1 year ago

Well, when I was a kid in the 80s in communist Romania, life was a lot similar to 19th century than what someone in Western countries was experiencing. No TV (obviously no computers), so most significant form of entertainment came from reading primarily. I never read "classics" or the books that were on school's compulsory list but I did read anything I could get my hands on and looked entertaining. I recall seeing the movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065207/ first time, some time after the fall of communism and invasion of cable TV and thinking, "I know this story!" because I read the book like 5 times, without knowing there's a movie too.

Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's being replaced by video content as primary source of entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much) reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not exceeding that.

ssttoo• 1 year ago

Similar experience in neighboring Bulgaria. I remember my dad being upset with me for wasting my time reading “readable little books” (my best effort at approx. translation) meaning fiction, as opposed to proper textbooks.

MichaelRo2• 1 year ago

Times have changed. My kid and the kids of every friend I know around me, have never opened a book on their own volition. Ever. Although they open the phone, tablet and laptop many times a day.

And it's not like they're stupid or anything, just have no desire to read, never learned to associate reading with something pleasurable.

But ... it shows. Like a friend has a kid who took the national exam that marks the end of secondary school (gymnasium) this year. He told me one question that was asked. Basically a conversation between John and George, John asking "George, will you start working or continue wasting your time doing nothing?", and George replies: "Right now I'm going to get the scissors to cut some leaves for the dogs". Question was, "What will George do? a) Start working or b) Continue wasting his time".

Kid chose "a) Start working" because as he argued, he goes after scissors and uses them to cut leaves, which is work. Asked my kid the same question, got the same answer: he'll start working. Well, but if they would have read a few books, they would have encountered the Romanian expression "cutting leaves to the dogs" as an idiom for laziness, lack of work, doing nothing. So they don't read anymore and it shows.

yesfitz• 1 year ago

This article provides a lot to think about.

To paraphrase some ideas poorly:

"LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."
"An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other."

The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.

beezlebroxxxxxx2• 1 year ago

BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance.

It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.

androng• 1 year ago

Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the effort.

beezlebroxxxxxx2• 1 year ago

That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick. Most of them are interchangeable. They're meant to make you think you're improving yourself by reading them. (Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe.)

Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.

Filmatic2• 1 year ago

Yeah, taking those as one's examples is the equivalent of judging the medium of film by watching YouTube "brain rot" videos. "These were a waste of time and I didn't get anything out of them". Well, yeah. That entire genre (I'm back to treating of self-help and pop-business and "surprising" pop-science books) is infamous for being all but entirely garbage, defying Sturgeon's usual "90% of everything is crap" and achieving something more like 99.9%—and even that may be a generous assessment.

dehrmann• 1 year ago

Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe

Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but running a hedge fund.

jghn• 1 year ago

I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers.

And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.

Der_Einzige2• 1 year ago

The real red pill is realizing that Jared Diamond's "guns, germs, and steel" was no more accurate or historical than the shit that Foucault was writing 30 years before

mindwok• 1 year ago

Many non fiction books are too long, I agree. But there’s also something lost when you treat these books as “extract lesson as fast as possible and move on”. There’s a joy sometimes in engaging with the material and taking your time.

molsongolden• 1 year ago

I need to read books like this with extra intentionality or it all just flows through and I might retain a couple of key concepts if I'm lucky.

1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.

2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Noticed this in myself. Number of books read per year absolutely cratered even while I’d say I’m reading more words in raw quantity

bilater• 1 year ago

too long - anyone has the tldr?

B1FF_PSUVM4• 1 year ago

the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.

Haha. Liars. Less than one percent, tops.

TheAceOfHearts2• 1 year ago

I think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will supercharge this.

New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books.

To a certain extent, translations which play with the presentation and complexity of the text have already been around for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the Bible.

Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology.

Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's The Road To Reality.

KPGv26• 1 year ago

New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation.

I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point.

nsriv• 1 year ago

Exactly this. On the less artistic side, I've seen so many critiques of popular self-help books for being anecdote heavy and people sharing (or even selling!) summaries of the key bullet points, and the whole point is to develop a resonance with the author to drive home the point. Otherwise it's now just a listicle.

libraryatnight• 1 year ago

Most people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you are doing and they get testy when you point it out.

TheAceOfHearts2• 1 year ago

I think the fixation on specific expressions being essential to understanding and appreciating something doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You're picking the most extreme case; but even then, if the alternative is between someone reading a summary of a poem and not reading anything about it at all then the summary is infinitely better.

If you read a translation of the Odyssey you can still gain a deep appreciation for the story. Do you think people from Homer's era would've lamented that people were reading the Odyssey instead of hearing it performed live? To my understanding, this was historically considered a key part of the Odyssey. The changing of modalities isn't something new.

Can you only appreciate the Tao Te Ching if you understand Chinese? This is one of the most deeply poetic works with multiple layers of meaning and interpretations. If you want to take a fully academic approach you can read literal translations of each character with side-by-side definitions and explanations. But I believe reading a translation can still convey the soul of the work.

For a more modern example: many people lament the proliferation of Let's Play videos on YouTube, where people record themselves playing through various games. Surely some would lament that you're missing the point by not playing through games yourself, but if the alternative is never having experienced the game and story, then maybe videos make a reasonable compromise.

If god appeared before you dressed as a beggar in the streets to give you life changing advice, I suspect that most would disregard it. The way in which a message is packaged is important, and not everyone is prepared to receive a message in any form, so it's best to meet them halfway and present it in a way that they can access.

ahamilton454• 1 year ago

This was a pretty thoughtful piece and a pleasure to read. My gut reaction at first was that it was going to be some critque on children not reading due to generative ai (a cynial piece), but it was quite an interesting reflection on simply how reading is changing from the prepective of this author whose spent a his life deeply reading books

The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.

dsign• 1 year ago

Once upon a time, reading and books were for the elites. The printing press and the Enlightenment changed that and, time passed, we got other forms of entertainment that required less and less mental investment. Now anybody can choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen. Maybe touching the inner mind of high-flying human thinkers will become a thing for the elites again, with the silver lining that access to books will be slightly less about how golden is one’s cradle.

B1FF_PSUVM4• 1 year ago

choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen

If you read enough books, you'll reach "vote-for-Trump mental acumen" again, if nothing else just to rile up the semi-literates.

asimpletune3• 1 year ago

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril.

On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.

compacct27• 1 year ago

Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome.

Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge

yannyu• 1 year ago

It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to.

"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.

How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.

I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.

The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.

bumby4• 1 year ago

I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading, but misses that reading (as a process, a verb) can be the goal in itself, at least in terms of recreational reading. Summarization misses all that experience, just like reading the synopsis of a movie isn’t the same as viewing the art. I don’t want everything in my life to be just a rush to the ends, anymore than I’d want to trade the human experience of hugging my child to be reduced to simply understanding “an increase in reading oxytocin creates bonding leading to higher resource investment and survivability.”

A rush to “get to the point” when dealing with art feels very much like the tech-obsessed productivity porn that can miss the forest for the trees.

ThrowawayR2• 1 year ago

"It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along."

A passage from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" springs immediately to mind.

"... 'Beware of first-hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'

Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men ..."

Or perhaps what Terry Pratchett wrote about the river Ankh may apply: "Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed." One has to wonder if people are thinking "Any idea that has passed through so many layers of minds has to be thoroughly refined indeed."

asimpletune3• 1 year ago

I mean, the insurmountable problem is - and will always be - that true knowledge lies beyond words. You can communicate and articulate and pontificate and these are all good things, but even at their best efforts they will never be more than a mechanical process that will never quite get you there. In other words, there will never be the right words to “get it” because what there is to get is fundamentally unexplainable.

It’s like trying to explain what one may see hear or feel when their on vacation at an exotic new location by talking about the train tracks that brought you there.

So when you’re reading you’re not downloading packets that add up to some kind of point. Instead, in the absolute best case scenario, you’re simulating the experience, according to the author’s recommended doses, of someone else “acquiring” knowledge. This “someone else” is the nameless reader the book was written for but they are not you.

YinglingHeavy• 1 year ago

Reddit is trivia porn

tines• 1 year ago

I had this exact thought the other day. Social media is information porn. Endless amounts of empty information that gives you the feeling of acquiring knowledge, with none of the substance.

SoftTalker4• 1 year ago

And also real porn.

beloch2• 1 year ago

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong.

I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.

Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.

When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?

barrkel• 1 year ago

And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here. Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles paid off.

dylan604• 1 year ago

I just watched Wild Ones on AppleTV, and I feel the same way about that series. IMDb has a tag line "Investigates the delicate ecosystems of our globe and finds information on how to help conserve and protect the most priceless endangered species." However, the entire thing felt more like a glorified influencer vlogging their vacay. It was much more about the camera people than the animals. I know this wasn't Planet Earth, but the footage they acquired was not the prominent bits of the series. It was produced well enough that I watched each episode and I was curious about each episode, but they all left me with the same feeling of meh about it.

Some of these articles are definitely more about the author being able to say they write than it is shedding light on anything or providing any kind of insight. It's all just gross to me

mattmanser• 1 year ago

But this isn't new, this is something that was very common pre-internet too.

It's an art form, and it's about exploring the people behind the ideas as well as the ideas themselves.

I used to love reading the Saturday and Sunday magazines that came with the paper, this was back in the 1990s. Many of those were always of this long form, rambling, structure.

If you can see the pattern it's obvious once you start reading.

There's a sort of teaser at the beginning. Then they dive into a person's history like this:

Super Bionics is an exciting new form of prosthetic that's revolutionising lives.

Steve Jones was sitting on his porch when he first thought of super-bionics. Steve had always been fascinated by robotics when he was growing up. At 3 years old.........

5 paragraphs later they'll finally do a bit more about the super-bionics.

Then each section gradually moves the story forward in exactly the same way. They intro the subject. They introduce a new person behind the subject and explore them and their motivations. Then they say a bit more about the actual subject.

You're mistaking a writing style with time wasting.

I don't have the patience for it any more, but lots of people do.

staunton2• 1 year ago

Objections:

- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.

- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.

- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.

SoftTalker4• 1 year ago

The pace of advancement in human civilization, expecially in science and technology (and all the conveniences and economic multipliers that have resulted) was very slow until literacy became widespread.

Before most people could read, you would learn a trade from your father or as an apprentice. Knowledge was handed down but you pretty much learned "the way it has always been done" and improvements were slow.

Once we all could learn from books and publish our discoveries, the spread of knowledge and the pace of advancement exploded. We went from farming with animal labor to walking on the moon in under a century.

prerok2• 1 year ago

Well, education researchers are trying to communicate that knowledge is never "transferred".

IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two problems:

1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case. The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but the brain in the student is making its own connections and tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way, leading to learning a different lesson from the one being taught.

2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present in their students.

So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right word for it.

HellDunkel2• 1 year ago

A great perspective but one problem remains: AI will radically change the book market. Great new books will be even harder to find as we are drowning in a sea of words. How do we stay afloat?

SoftTalker4• 1 year ago

There are more great books written before 2022 than a person could read in a lifetime. Stick with those.

chickensong• 1 year ago

Seek out book enthusiasts, which in some ways (tools, internet), is easier than ever, and find your tribe(s) that align with your taste. AI or not, the volume of books is ever increasing. Word of mouth, personal recommendations, curated lists, all are only increasing in value.

jiehong• 1 year ago

Just like you wouldn’t summarise a poem.

xandrius3• 1 year ago

Roses are coloured.

Rhyming ending.

perching_aix• 1 year ago

people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.

This seems extremely detached from reality. Just to give you an anecdotal example, I used to love reading books as a kid, but you'd be extremely hard pressed to find me reading one now. Clearly my reading habits have changed, and so it cannot be some intrinsic property written in my fate (which seems to be assumed to exist in the quoted framing).

Conversely, book purchases wouldn't fall or rise, especially over long timeframes, if there weren't changes in reading habits. It just doesn't make sense to portray people as these immovable objects, whose desire to read has been inscribed into them at birth.

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward.

When reading novels for pleasure is not among your hobbies, it most likely will be. You bet I don't often want to read e.g. documentation: I just want to get my hands on the magic incantations or magic phrases / values required, and move on with my day.

But this is true even for literature class, with its mandatory readings. I was one of the more naive folks in my class, so I'd make an earnest attempt at reading through those things. At the end, that only mattered to the extent that I can now tell you it was a complete chore. And the "reward" at the end of those was good test scores of course - something others could replicate by just relying on, then manually written, summaries.

one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

It is at most only an opinion that there is no understanding there, and so is that the impression the person would have about their understanding is false. Understanding is not a binary property, despite what e.g. the anti-AI crowd would make one believe, and you're no mind reader. I think that's pretty agreeable at least.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.

I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was going to type something into an LLM, they could have typed it into a search bar. People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read! They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!

I was correct. Now we have a costly LLM implementation and have our time wasted with questions that are already answered.

stavros• 1 year ago

You put the LLM in the wrong place. Put it as the first tier of email reply, then the people reaching out to you will get their LLM reply and not bug you.

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

You must be the org that operates this mysterious, legendary KB system that has any actual information in it.

None of the KB systems I've ever encountered, from orgs big and small, reputable or otherwise, had in them any useful information whatsoever. It's all just bullshit, roundabout sales, and a lot of answers to questions no actual human being would ever ask.

Whether or not to put LLM in the KB's search bar is immaterial. Myself, when I see a KA syste, I immediately close the tab and "bounce" back to the search engine.

People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read!

Yes, but also because they don't trust you to provide enough information to diagnose and solve their problem. There's no point wasting the time when experience tells you most customer-facing KBs are nothing but false hope and misleading headlines.

They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!*

Yes, but not because they hate that random support person - it's because it's the only remotely reliable way to solve the problem itself. Companies shouldn't complain, not after standardizing knowledgebases and phone menus, which are all implicitly and often explicitly designed to keep customers away from support staff - and instead of providing a solution, they're optimized to make the user think the solution exists somewhere and they're just too dumb to find it (therefore, user's own fault, not company's fault; customer's brand perception unaffected).

As for making it the support person's problem - that's literally their job. That's what they're paid for.

dayvid• 1 year ago

A lot of modern business books are guilty of word stuffing, like webpages trying to hit 500 words to get SEO ranked. Dense works and older books tend to have a better reading journey.

socalgal22• 1 year ago

Doesn't it really depend on what we're reading? I generally wouldn't want to skip any words in a fiction novel. I would love to skip words in most self-help books that turn out to be 3 paragraphs of "the point" and 100-200 pages of fluff to get the book on the shelf. Another perfect example is nearly any online recipe with 25 screens of fluff at the top to get to the 1 screen recipe.

landgenoot• 1 year ago

Another perfect example is nearly any online recipe with 25 screens of fluff at the top to get to the 1 screen recipe.

These 25 screens of text are not for you, they are for Google.

8note• 1 year ago

i for one always enjoyed reader's digest even though i knew it was heavily critiqued by all the fancy people.

i still like reading the adapted books into chapters from the walrus too. i havent been a subscriber in a while, but they tend to be nice reads that dont require me to commit to reading the same thing for the next couple weeks on the toilet

asimpletune3• 1 year ago

That’s a blast from the past. I also loved readers digest! I would find them all over the place when I was little and devoured them.

delusional• 1 year ago

If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

It's bad for the individual, but even worse for the collective. The AI summary reader isn't just convinced they understand, they also share that incorrect understanding in discussion. They effectively inject LLM slop into real life conversations and forget the subjectivity of reading.

This leads to what I consider more harmful. Discussions where the particiants themselves don't even believe in the stuff they are arguing. Where human beings, devoid of their own subjectivity, sling summaries and empty "facts" at each other. As if what 1984 textually said is important in any way beyond how you and I, the humans, connected with it.

mfro• 1 year ago

I found very quickly when I started associating with philosophy majors, reading the material usually does not correlate to understanding it, and many people simply don't want to put in the effort to understand something that isn't clear at first glance.

I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace. I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.

throwmeaway222• 1 year ago

Promise of AI: All text will be generated

Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI

kevindamm• 1 year ago

Will the small web still survive?

kridsdale13• 1 year ago

As long as there are dorks obsessed with mini painting, trains, odd fish, old knitting patterns, there will be communities and blogs for them.

footy2• 1 year ago

My manager and I had a conversation about this in a recent one on one and I realized I may just never read a new author if they were published after 2020 again. At least not without a very solid recommendation.

I have negative interest in what LLMs write.

LocalPCGuy• 1 year ago

I don't begrudge them their ability to make a living, but it is a bit ironic that I can't read an article about reading without a subscription or archival service. I get that isn't really the point of the article, but I do think that news/magazines inability to find a way to successfully move beyond the heavily subsidized advertising-supported model (and so the current clunky experience in general) cannot help inspire more people to read. Not claiming it actively reduces readers as a whole, just that it's one less avenue for increasing the desire to do so.

Animats• 1 year ago

From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain, I had to buy a special lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand."

And get off my lawn.

Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.

pessimizer• 1 year ago

People are so much more literate than they were even a short time ago. Having to type in order to participate on the internet and the Harry Potter phenomenon both seriously upgraded world literacy in general.

edit:

[...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.

Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to 100%

Loughla• 1 year ago

Are 13 year olds reading on the Internet though? My experience working with the youth is that they consume video, not written material

SamBam3• 1 year ago

Evidence?

coliveira3• 1 year ago

You have no idea what teens are doing, it is mostly video all day long.

tolerance• 1 year ago

The issue is reading comprehension. Not the mere ability to read.

d0odk• 1 year ago

The article has several paragraphs addressing these points...

chairmansteve• 1 year ago

He almost certainly didn't read it....

Analemma_• 1 year ago

Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.

I'm not convinced this is providing any value in the way you're implying. When people talk about the cognitive benefits of writing, what they mean is writing which makes you organize your thoughts, and notice when they are messy and disjointed. I think a majority of the writing people do online is not of that form: instead it takes the form of emotional outbursts which essentially go directly from the amygdala to the fingers and barely involve the higher brain functions at all, much less trigger the kind of introspection and reflection that people mean when they say writing is good for you.

In other words, just as not all reading is equally valuable, I don't think all writing is either and I think almost all Internet writing is of the low-value kind.

SamBam3• 1 year ago

Actually, young people are writing more.

Is this a feeling, or something you know from statistics?

Many of the teens I know (I'm a teacher) aren't writing blog posts, or even comments on Reddit. They're watching YouTube videos and not interacting back with anything more than a thumbs up.

Sure, some are writing on anime subreddits or whatever, but I don't want to make generalizations for what teens are doing across the US or the rest of the Western world without some kind of statistics.

kridsdale13• 1 year ago

They’re writing in iMessage, Instagram, and ChatGPT.

daedrdev• 1 year ago

It's hard to find recent data, but the trend has been far more books were published in the 2010s than in the decades before, by like 10 or 100x. There is an even more enormous amount of fan works published. However, data since ChatGPT was invented is probably poisoned by people using it to write even if I could find it.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 1 year ago

Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.

If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate description might be a random sample of phrases that spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.

prerok2• 1 year ago

Joyce would be proud :P

azangru• 1 year ago

Yes; this is what university courses in literature do: they force-feed texts to students at a rate that many struggle to absorb. Instead of reading selected texts slowly and with pleasure, students rush through them with curses. It's been bewildering to me, back when I was going through a similar, though lighter, ordeal, why this was the case.

snickerbockers• 1 year ago

did they really just paywall an article about how nobody reads things anymore?

taco_emoji• 1 year ago

tldr

sw0306952• 1 year ago

"There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop."

Ironically straight after reading this was an inline video advertisement, and this page crashes constantly (2.6 GB memory usage for an article?)

ainiriand• 1 year ago

Kind of off topic but what browser are you using?

sw0306952• 1 year ago

Google Chrome, so maybe to be expected, but 2.6GB is a lot

dr_dshiv• 1 year ago

Remember reading “highlights” and getting scholastic magazines where you could choose which books to buy?

Good luck finding that kind of ambient infrastructure for pleasure reading today…

smeej6• 1 year ago

I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new.

I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.

I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.

Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person. They don't just see written words and know what they say. They really have to work to get meaning out of written text.

With the proliferation of other means of taking in information, many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They didn't want to do it before. And now they don't need to do it either.

hellisothers• 1 year ago

Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words

Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?

bombcar• 1 year ago

It’s probably true insofar as if random assholes accost me and ask to read a page from a book I’m more likely to employ old Anglo Saxon than engage with their stupidity.

watwut4• 1 year ago

A weirdo approaches you with a highly unusual request. You suspect the goal is to humiliate you or make you into a dummy somehow, which is actually their goal. No thanks.

I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?

There is reading and then there is reading an unknown text out loud in public while being judged. The two are not the same thing. I had to read publicly when I was a student years ago when smartphones were a new thing. They handed me the text with instructions to reread it at least twice ideally out loud before performing.

The point is, it is not like 20 years ago a good student would be expected to read super fluidly out loud in public without at least a little preparation.

footy2• 1 year ago

I read like 80 books in a slow year but if someone approached me at the grocery store and asked me to read even a children's book I would refuse. It's not because I can't read, it's because when I'm at the grocery store I am kind of busy getting my groceries and don't want to engage with a stranger who has an odd request.

That stranger might conclude I can't read, when in reality I devour books, am the beta reader for my two published-author friends, and probably edit the "thoughts on books I've read" section of my personal wiki more than any other.

KittenInABox• 1 year ago

I don't want to correlate the ability to read aloud to a stranger about the same as parsing. It's possible to read and not parse what you're saying (that's what teleprompters are for) and its possible to parse and not speak. Do we have formal studies for comprehension?

rizzom5000• 1 year ago

I believe you, and this has been know for decades. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755

The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.

smeej6• 1 year ago

This is wild, but is exactly what I'm talking about. Only 13% of adults were proficient in reading prose or documents. Thirteen!

I knew "most" American adults couldn't. I didn't realize it was 87%.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

I think that you're greatly overstating the point.

But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you.

I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.

photonthug4• 1 year ago

I don't know. Talking with strangers is always kind of insane, or at least a pretty illogical leap of faith, because there's not much chance that the interaction is interesting or amusing. Now a stranger that walks up to me and demands some dramatic reading of Paradise Lost, stat? Ok, I'm intrigued, hold my beer and buckle up while I let you hear about regions of sorrow and darkness visible because the produce section has never seen some shit like this

jraph5• 1 year ago

walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words

Of course.

I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech.

What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.

Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth.

With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.

Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.

We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently.

For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.

kixiQu• 1 year ago

With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.

Even "caught off guard", not "feeling particularly positive", and "reading phrasing from someone else", some people have so fundamentally mastered reading as a skill that this wouldn't be difficult for them even if the challenge were attempted drunk. The point of the parent comment was, I believe, that for such people it may be hard to imagine that others would believe "reading a wall of text is indeed hard" because it isn't for them.

sneak• 1 year ago

You have spent a lot of time and effort to explain precisely how and why you failed to get GP’s point, which is completely true and valid despite whatever unintentional misdirection you have posted in response.

DrammBA• 1 year ago

Do schools not ask kids to read out loud in class anymore? Any one of my classmates could read a page out loud fluently even if you stopped them randomly at the grocery store, and most of us are not even 30 yet.

smeej6• 1 year ago

I think you're missing the point that most of the things that make this hard for people are also what makes it hard enough for them to read that they won't do it well, even for things like emails.

Reading is a skill, and it's not the same as being (technically) literate. For someone who's a competent reader, there's nothing at all more intimidating about being asked to read a page from a book (you can choose the book, but a page from a book is not a "wall of text," and the book's publication also implies at least some pre-screening for accessibility) than being asked to have an impromptu conversation about where to find the potatoes, and whether you know any tasty recipes for them.

Most people don't read well. They read well enough to understand street signs before they pass them, or to get through an article intentionally written to a 6th grade level. But anything where the details are important? Or that requires explanation? They either cannot do it, or find it so difficult that they won't.

_dain_• 1 year ago

It's actually not that hard to speak text fluently. You need to practice, but only a little. The trick is to speak a little slower than you read, and pre-emptively flick your eyes to the right, skimming the oncoming text, so you have a buffer of context in your mind. Pause a little more at sentence boundaries; this gives you more headroom and makes you sound more refined. The idea isn't to fully process the future text, but to get a rough sense of where it's going -- a question, a subordinate clause, a list, etc -- so you can adjust your intonation in advance.

As an experiment I spoke your comment aloud as I read it. It sounded natural and I made no mistakes at all.

StefanBatory3• 1 year ago

... if I was asked by a stranger to read a page of book for them out of blue in a store, I'd be staring dumbfounded, questioning whether everything's alright with them.

wiseowise• 1 year ago

You overlooked one crucial fact.

I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.

They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones radar that they'll actually pay attention?

conductr4• 1 year ago

This. If someone sends me a full page email, I immediately skip it. No time for that. They'll follow up more concisely when it becomes important. Or if it requires such elaborate description, a phone call or meeting would have probably been a better channel for this communication. Likewise, anytime I start typing an email and it gets lengthy I know I'd be better off picking up the phone/scheduling a call.

joshvm• 1 year ago

Is it fair to assume that comfort in speaking/oration correlates to reading comprehension?

I don't know that what you've described is any different now than 20 years ago when I was in high school. People struggled to read aloud texts like plays or classic literature. I would use that as a bar for complex prose that benefits from good narration; often the point was to encounter unfamiliar words or meter and to read with the purpose of critical analysis. A friend of mine is an author and we did a group reading of a play they'd written. Quite hard to do off the bat. Similarly if you've ever tried to DM a role-playing game like DnD, where the text you read is semi-randomly chosen based on what the characters decided to do (also, will you role-play dialog?).

I've worked in academia for 10+ years at this point. You can tell almost immediately if a presenter has had practice, knows their material or is comfortable speaking in public. Lecturers and professors are, unsurprisingly, often very comfortable giving presentations and there are people who live for conferences and working groups. We're required to read dense material frequently. Understanding of a piece of work, or the attention span required to ingest a scientific paper, does not necessarily mean you could read it aloud fluently.

conductr4• 1 year ago

I think one can possess decent reading comprehension skills while also be deficient in their reading aloud skill. Beyond classroom requirements, reading aloud is not a typical activity many people engage in even if reading silently is.

pfg_• 1 year ago

I can read in my head fine. Reading aloud I'm slow and words come out stilted. It's a skill that takes practice to be good at, and it's rare to need. I don't think that's a useful metric.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

While different places define "literate" differently, I've seen figures that say 20% of adults in the USA are functionally illiterate.

jobigoud2• 1 year ago

But you are mixing input and output.

It's obvious if you think about learning a foreign language. Parsing written text silently is a completely different task than producing speech with the right intonations, even if you recognize the words.

Reading aloud fluidly requires a certain speed and anticipation. You have to be reading the next word in your head while you are still pronouncing the previous one. This isn't necessarily correlated with reading comprehension which is purely input.

gkanai• 1 year ago

Every day one step closer to the reality of Wall-e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E

rafaelmn2• 1 year ago

I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.

How is that relevant ? Reading out loud is not the same as reading ? I struggle to keep pace with reading out loud - because I am just not used to it. I do better now that I read to my kids, but I don't think I have reading problems - reading out loud is a skill that's on top of reading. Speech patterns, words you're used to pronouncing, etc. all make reading out loud more difficult than speaking or just reading IMO

whycome2• 1 year ago

These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration

Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.

rpdillon• 1 year ago

This has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times.

https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs

BobaFloutist2• 1 year ago

Wow, that's crazy!

whycome2• 1 year ago

This is cool! Though, in canada that link breaks and there's no mention of it.

There should be a way to do this 'manually' with an ebook paired with the audio book. As simple as timestamps embedded in the text?

roadside_picnic• 1 year ago

Interestingly enough Claude has me reading much more. Especially with math books, one of the greatest challenges to self-study can be making sure you are in fact getting the concepts correct. Without this it's easy to get fairly deep into a book only to give up once you realize you haven't quite built the picture in your head right. Often you do get it, but it takes multiple re-reads/alternate views of the problem.

With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding. When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my learning and has me reading much more these days.

Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations, especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment of a subject.

shakabrah• 1 year ago

What I would have given to have had ChatGPT in college stuck reading Barthes.

interestica• 1 year ago

I saw an example recently of a sort of “AI Codec” : A person has to send a message to a respected figure of authority. They organize their thoughts and requests into a clear and concise bulleted list with explanations. But, that seemed heavily informal and unprofessional. So they used AI to convert the bullets to paragraphs and sent it out.

The authority received the large body of text but, due to time commitments and attention, they didn’t have time to read it all. They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.

jobigoud2• 1 year ago

This is great. Maybe this hints at a different approach, instead of asking the LLM to expand the bullets into paragraphs we could ask it to generate a text that, when asked to be summarized by an LLM will produce the original bullets.

shiandow• 1 year ago

What's happening to reading? Followed by several popups that unaccountably take ages to make themselves known and prevent me from reading the damn article.

Not the point they wanted to make, but a point nonetheless.

swayvil• 1 year ago

Reading is very drug-like. Staring for hours. Focusing your attention on this visually-inspired, elongated mental event. It alters your consciousness for sure. And we're pushing it on kids.

Some of the most enthusiastic readers I know are also opiate addicts.

xorvoid• 1 year ago

For many people, paywalls may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.

Frotag• 1 year ago

It’s reasonable to argue that some kinds of writing shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, be summarized. [...] maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does—but length and difficulty are part of the point of that book

I get that there's an emotional payoff to things like flowery prose. It helps put you in the mindset of the author / characters, which makes seeing them overcome whatever problems all the more satisfying. That's what I expect if I pick up a book about say, friends-since-birth being torn apart by war, with one entering the military and committing atrocities to reunite them.

On the other hand, if I pick up a book about deciphering alien language found on the moon, I'm not reading for the characters. I'm reading to see how hypothetical aliens would think. Which in practice is often "what would humans be like if we added / removed constraint X" (eg perfect empathy or genetic memory). In this case, lengthy prose and other character development just feel like filler. Like I don't actually care that the character became interested in linguistics after growing up on a farm and watching animal behavior. Just tell me about the aliens!

maksimur• 1 year ago

I wonder if we even need to consume content by reading, as opposed to watching or listening, to be neurologically healthy and developed, considering it's something we didn't start doing until a few thousand years ago. Isn't reading kind of a specialization of watching?

nomadygnt• 1 year ago

In my mind reading is more similar to thinking than watching. I have no basis for this but it just feels more mentally active. Of course it could just be my biases but I feel it is much easier to passively watch or listen to something rather than to read. But also I would say from my own experience writing and speaking promote “neurological health” even more so maybe the method of consumption is not as important as long as there is sufficient synthesis and thought on the other end.

chillingeffect• 1 year ago

We don't need to, in the sense that we survived without it. However a key difference between reading and passively listening or watching is the ability to dynamically vary the pace and re-thread ideas together. E.g. to slow down during complex parts, e.g. involving lots of pronouns, tenses, or familial relations, to move your eyes around on the page, and even to pause a moment to quiz and rehearse to ones' self on the material. To even attempt to connect it with existing ideas from other sources.

While theoretically possible with non-linear media like videos and audio playback, the fluidity of reading is far superior. Thus, passive consumption leads to many fragments of ideas remaining atomized and not sticking. In contrast, reading allows one to efficiently stitch numerous ideas together.

The point of reading is not to become convinced or apprehend a single summarizable point. Rather, it is to fill one's memory banks with thoughts, experiences and ideas that can be combined with other ones and synthesize new information.

Contrast wandering though a botanical garden, reading labels and looking at plants on the one hand. On the other hand, picture a slow-moving bus that rolls continuously through the garden. The bus may pause from time to time, but mostly it remains on the path, letting you watch things go by from a distance. Both means of travel "get you through" the garden, but the self-pacing version allows a personal connection to the information.

So it would be convenient for a farmer to have his animals illiterate, yet capable of listening passively to commands over loudspeakers. And to the farmer, it would be inconvenient for these animals to learn to read and explore material on their own which would eventually lead them to an awareness that they don't want to be fenced in, farmed, and eaten. So you can see why some questionable leaders are comfortable with illiteracy as a means of control. While others seek to empower humanity through encouraging reading.

thisoneisreal• 1 year ago

Strongly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" if you're interested in exploring this question further. It has a strong bias towards reading but does a very thoughtful comparison of various media. We don't need to consume content of any form, of course.

anthonypasq• 1 year ago

written language is just much more information dense than talking. the goal of writing is to distill someones thinking into the most effective vehicle to transfer it without time constraints.

i imagine cultures that refined oral histories over generations ended up at a similar place, but that doesnt really happen nowadays. It really is true that instead of listening to a 3 hour podcast about a topic, you could probably get all that info within 30 minutes of reading.

orsenthil• 1 year ago

"maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does—but length and difficulty are part of the point of that book"

This the crux of this article which I agree with. Read it.

wosined• 1 year ago

I really don't get what is the point of articles such as this one. Maybe writers should focus on writing less bloated articles with clear prupose and AI reading would be unnecessary or at least not as frequent. At least there could be some claim or hypothesis, some evidence or counter-evidence, but this is just a string of weakly related observations without any real overarching explanation. Just a mind dump or barf.

karaterobot2• 1 year ago

In our current reading regime, summarized or altered texts are the exception, not the rule. But over the next decade or so, that polarity may well reverse

Most people don't read many books as it is. That's sad, but it's true for a couple decades. Those people will continue not reading.

Of the remainder, some people will continue to read books because reading books is enjoyable. It's not a chore, it's fun, so there is no reason to try to automate it away.

Another portion of people who read books only read them to get through them. Usually that's either because they want to understand some idea in them, or sometimes just so they can say they've read the book. These are the people who will use AI to summarize books rather than reading them line-by-line. I have zero problems with that, personally. That's not existentially troubling to me at all.

Nah, not too worried. Not about this anyway.

The thing that worries me about the future of literature is customization. I think having a shared monoculture—even a canon—is a good thing that we should strive for. We need it, to be part of the same community. The day that AI can easily just spin out a book that's exactly what you ask for, there won't be any reason for any two people to read the same books, let alone the same twenty million people. That will just accelerate the cultural fragmentation and attended alienation our culture has been living through for a while.

keiferski• 1 year ago

I don’t really buy this narrative anymore, and I think it’s more a reflection of individualist technologists than how regular people interact with culture. A big percentage of what’s read or watched is driven by what other people are reading or watching and has nothing to do with personal preferences. Just look at the Netflix shows that become extremely popular and watched by huge amounts of people, mostly to be discussed online or with friends. That behavior isn’t going away just because an AI can make a book or show tailored to my consumer preferences.

karaterobot2• 1 year ago

There may be a bit of that—watching things so that you can talk about them with other people. But, when I've done that (in the last 5 years or so), it's usually because there are one or two people I know who want to talk about a show. It's never been show that everyone I knew was watching.

The same is true of books, only moreso, since I only know a few other people who regularly read for pleasure, and with whom I might share a reading experience.

So it may be hyperbolic to say that no two people will be reading the same books, I think it's directionally true that we'll continue getting more and more narrowcasted, personalized content over time, thanks to AI, and devoting a larger portion of our time watching it, compared to content aimed at a wider audience.

pixelmonkey• 1 year ago

I wrote a little on this topic in "Putting Your Media on a Diet":

https://amontalenti.com/2024/01/31/media-diet

Written in Jan 2024. I sensed that the world had already moved on from reading as a core source of information and awareness of the world.

But in that essay, I tried to make the case that this is a mistake -- that the environment has never been better for deep readers, that the internet and the various sources of cheap/free long-form text can be a deep reading utopia, if properly curated.

But that's the issue. Most people click into the default. They don't curate. They don't monitor their media diet. And so they are drawn, like moths to a flame, to short-form video (especially), as well as other passive information sources that resemble TV and talk radio from prior eras.

vivzkestrel• 1 year ago

Too many people writing is a problem they have not discussed in this article. Information is too diluted. I dont have the time to read 5000 books on forex trading. What I want is an LLM crunching all 5000 forex trading books into one book with very concise information. I could apply this idea to "Value investing", "Cookbooks", "Startups", "Business", "Finance" and so on. Does anyone here on HN have an LLM capable of doing this or working on something along these lines?

zkmon• 1 year ago

Ofcourse, the publishers care about decline in reading. Readers care about their priorities in life, and how to distribute their attention across what matters most to them. If social networking matters most, it deserves more attention. Further, knowledge-seeking and cramming your memory with all sorts of facts is no longer a necessity.

Even in the past, Europeans were able to advance the knowledge and science only because their priorities and socio-political conditions allowed it, unlike other parts of the world which were always subjected to survival struggles.

rwoerz• 1 year ago

The provided text explores the significant transformation of reading in the digital age, contrasting traditional reading habits with contemporary practices influenced by technology and artificial intelligence.

---

### The Evolution of Reading

A few decades ago, *reading was a straightforward, private activity*, where individuals engaged with physical texts at their own pace. The internet, however, has fundamentally shifted this experience. While some still prefer traditional books, many now encounter texts through various digital platforms, often switching between formats like e-readers and audio narration. The constant presence of distractions like YouTube and Netflix means that reading today often requires a conscious effort to *choose not to stop*.

---

### Declining Traditional Reading Rates

This shift has been particularly pronounced among younger generations. The *National Endowment for the Arts* reported a decline in adults reading at least one book a year, from *55% to 48%* over the decade leading up to 2023. More dramatically, the *National Center for Education Statistics* found that the number of *thirteen-year-olds who read for fun "almost every day" plummeted from 27% to 14%* in roughly the same period. This decline has led to increased concerns from college professors about students' ability to engage with complex, lengthy texts.

---

### The "Gutenberg Parenthesis" and the Rise of AI

The text discusses the concept of the "Gutenberg Parenthesis," suggesting that the internet closed a historical period dominated by print, returning us to a more conversational and decentralized communication style. The rise of podcasts and newsletters supports this idea of a "secondary orality."

However, the emergence of *artificial intelligence (AI)*, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, introduces a new dimension to this evolution. These AI systems "read" and process unimaginable quantities of text at superhuman speeds, recalling information, drawing connections, and extracting insights. This has led some, like economist Tyler Cowen, to consider "writing for the AIs," envisioning a future where AI can analyze and preserve a writer's thought process.

---

### AI-Assisted Reading and the Future of Text

AI's capabilities allow for *new forms of reading, such as on-demand abridgments and summaries*. Tools like Blinkist already offer condensed versions of books. AI can also simplify complex texts, as demonstrated by Claude rewriting the challenging opening of "Bleak House" into more modern English. This blurs the line between original texts and their summarized or altered versions, suggesting a future where readers might routinely start with alternative texts and only later seek out originals.

While some texts, like complex literary works, may lose their essence when summarized, and the value of authentic human voices will likely persist, the text posits that the *intrinsic integrity of writing might become less powerful*. The analogy of music sampling suggests that "remix culture" could extend to reading, where multiple versions of a text exist and are accepted.

The author reflects on their own intensive reading experiences as a Ph.D. student, highlighting the *finitude of human reading and memory*. AI, by contrast, can help find value in otherwise unread texts and potentially deepen reading memories by enabling ongoing interaction with information. However, AI lacks intrinsic motivation and relies on human "reading culture" for its usefulness.

The article concludes by contemplating a future where *text is fluid, fungible, and abstractable*. Getting the "gist" of a text will be easy, and encountering the original will become a conscious choice. This could lead to new writing styles, with some writers aiming to repel automated reading, and a shift in what it means to be "well-read." Text may transition from a finished product to a "stepping stone to something else."

chriscardoz• 1 year ago

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I have been reading and writing more because of LLMs; not less. Granted, I was a voracious reader in my teens. But, during college, I lost interest in reading. The reason was that I was reading for the sake of reading, and often boring stuff. With the advent of LLMs, I am asking the models interesting questions, getting to know more about the world, going off on adventures and rabbit holes for a topic. Its just like my teens again; voraciously reading interesting stuff. Thats the trick I guess, just read stuff that you find interesting and you will want to read more.

Nevermark• 1 year ago

The greatest advantage of long form reading, both fiction and non-fiction, is it scales up our ability to internally and intensely world-build and cathedral-of-concepts build at high scale, high density and at a high resolution of relationships and/or facts.

Our imaginations and reasoning become capable of accreting and operating over much larger internal structures deeply and coherently, in the day to week time range.

The only other equivalent I can think of in terms of both scale and detail, are major areas of study, which we develop over years or a lifetime, or large engineering projects, such as a large architectural of software project, which we develop over months or a few years.

The much faster cadence of books on a daily or weekly basis is an incredible mental workout we can carry on our whole lives. And great preparation and maintenance, for being able to think at both the highest scales and resolutions.

I have seen children that got read to every night, when they were tiny, and went on to become avid readers as adults. And children in the same cohort that didn't, who find reading a book very challenging as adults. They are all grown up intelligent, curious, with good jobs, and still know each other. But there is a marked difference in their abilities to think about the world, and the scale of their thinking and interests.

Since these children were in a cohort, and still know each other, it is telling that the children that didn't learn to read and enjoy book length reading early in life, are well aware of that difference within the group, and have expressed the wish that they would have had more early exposure to reading books.

For myself, I was read to as a tot, and then very socially isolated for most of my childhood, with the result that I learned to read voraciously for decades. And would go to great lengths to find ways to earn money to buy books.

But even I have a harder time now. There are a lot of insightful and quality blogs and articles to read on the internet, but after that displaced a lot of long book reading, I have noticed the latter presents a greater challenge for me. That it presents a challenge at all is a significant change.

Contrary to that, reading formal papers seems to be a great challenge for my mind, in terms of keeping it sharp. A lot of papers require a high intensity of thinking to fully understand.

Which strikes me as interesting, and perhaps an untapped opportunity for young readers. I don't know what the young reader fiction or non-fiction equivalent of a formal paper would be. But perhaps a short story mystery or intense subject dive, that required the reader to solve or apply the knowledge in some way would be an interesting format for children. Higher scale puzzle solving, in short form reading format.

Perhaps dense essays for children, but highly vetted/curated for being of of genuine natural interest to children. Across a very wide variety of areas, so children have great freedom to pursue their own interests without being pushed or funneled. Traditional childhood subjects of spontaneous study, like dinosaurs, cosmology, animals, cultures, ancient history, how to make things, would all be good areas.

I love the idea of having a recognizable format for these essays that somewhat mimics formal papers aesthetically. Gives the children a clear aesthetic signal of what is an intense "chapter sized book", vs. a regular book or other type of reading. And makes the adult activity of learning at the frontier, feel familiar to them very early on.

I believe a lot of ways children's potential is wasted is simply not introducing little bits of downstream patterns and aesthetics earlier. Children have an incredible ability to absorb simpler forms of complex "adult brain" subjects early. And when they do, they find the latter much less challenging and more interesting when they eventually encounter them in their full complex/challenging form. Simple feelings of familiarity are so helpful to us emotionally when we encounter a new challenges.

What's happening to reading?

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