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.
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.
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.
They have a convention of prefacing articles with a category from their own taxonomy (“Personal History”, “Shouts and Mumurs”, “Reporter at Large”, “Talk of the town”, etc.) that signify the sort of article you’re going to get. In print this works well, as the heading is prominent, and each type occurs in a somewhat consistent order in the magazine, so you have a few clues you might be reading a type you dislike. I worry this hasn’t translated well to their online readership, and has contributed to a poorer reputation than they deserve.
Any good sources for longform articles?
Read this if you have time to kill:
"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:
https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.
One of the best! If memory serves there was a This American Life segment excerpted from it too (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/195/transcript).
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
Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?
Click-bait. I'm not immune. I see something tantalizing and then I have to know. I've been burned by Hacker News more than once.
It clear when long form gets 7 upvotes in minutes and hits the top of hacker news . I avoid those now
I mean I read the New Yorker OP article because it was posted on hacker news, and highly voted. It was probably too short to be considered long form, but I feel like I was baited into reading a rambling article where I gained nothing of value other than at best a summary of other peoples thoughts, where the only conclusion I can practically draw with out reading a lot more is "Joshua Rothman and others don't like how people are consuming content".
https://longreads.com/ maybe
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.
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.
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.
I believe this is a prime example of platform decay (“enshittification”). This tends to make the customer experience worse to reduce the workload/increase profits for the company. At least with the current version of LLM chatbots, I’ve yet to call and get a satisfactory answer to any mildly nuanced problem. It tends to add a layer of needless frustration and delay before eventually linking me to a human anyway.
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.
As a counter point, I’ve read through more than one knowledge base systems I found perfectly sufficient for answering my questions
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
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.
My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics, even people talked about in the submission, popping in and thoroughly debunking all the bullshit the submission itself has.
Of course, there's also commenters posting uninformed bullshit on the submission topic without actually reading the submission. But, again from experience, those comments have tell-tale smells, which you learn to recognize.
>higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides.
I have this experience too, until I remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. There are certain forums where there appear to be loads of high value takes, people discussing with confidence and conviction. And then you run into those same types of comments on a topic you’re actually a relative expert in, and they prove to be quite low value perspectives, but said with the same confidence and conviction. That tends to temper my feelings that any low-effort medium can be generalized as high-value.
OP. Yep. I wanted to read an article on this topic. When I read this one, I wanted more perspective. I know where to go for that, so here we are.
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.
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.“
Alan Watts
Conversely (or a corollary?), comparing one's prose to a symphony is considered a...unusually high bar to meet.
I think you've missed the point of the quote. It's not an analogy to prose, per se, but merely stating that you don't need to just "get to the point" and, instead, can enjoy a work throughout. A symphony isn't inherently good, it was just the metaphor of choice Alan Watts chose to convey that we should be able to enjoy living our lives without constantly thinking of constant improvement.
That said, I do also think you can apply it to the enjoyment of prose in that you don't need to read it, tapping your fingers, waiting for some climax and then a minor denouement, expressing frustration if "the point" seems to be taking to long to get to. Certainly there is a lot of bad writing that can be overly verbose/messy/in need of editing/etc. and, depending on the nature of the writing, attempting to write "artful" prose can be a misstep. But, often, I find that you can find great pieces of prose in an essay/article/novel/etc. that are well-composed, sometimes profound, and a general joy to read. Though, judging by many of the comments in this thread, many don't care to read that way.
> I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading
Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.
> "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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. Does any of that contradict something I wrote?
> 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.
Reddit is trivia porn
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.
I feel this way about The News.
And also real porn.
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.
> 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.
Just like you wouldn’t summarise a poem.
Roses are coloured.
Rhyming ending.
Alternative summary of Roses Are Red: Love, simplicity, beauty, ambiguity, tradition.
There are different ways of summarizing a text. Odyssey (another poem) could be summarized bluntly:
Homer's The Odyssey follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his perilous journey home after the Trojan War. For ten years, he faces trials, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch Circe, and the deadly Sirens, while angering the sea god Poseidon. Meanwhile, in Ithaca, his wife Penelope fends off persistent suitors, awaiting his return. With the help of the goddess Athena, Odysseus finally returns, disguised as a beggar. He reveals himself, defeats the suitors in a contest of skill and battle, and reunites with Penelope.
Or it can be summarized as I summarized Roses Are Red:
The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, is a richly layered epic that follows Odysseus’ tumultuous journey home after the Trojan War. It explores themes of heroism, identity, loyalty, and human frailty through encounters with gods, monsters, and mortals. The narrative intertwines adventure with moments of introspection, revealing a tension between fate and agency. Penelope’s endurance, Telemachus’ coming-of-age, and Odysseus’ cunning invite reflection on resilience and transformation. Yet, its moral ambiguities—violence, deception, and divine caprice—resist tidy resolution. The epic’s power lies in its openness to interpretation, offering a timeless meditation on the complexities of human experience and the longing for home.
Obviously very different approaches.
Present both and you'd have a pretty decent summary of the Odyssey.
And yet, the long form exists. Because reading (or in the case of the Odyssey, narrating/speaking the story) is experiential. Just as you can summarize a movie, the plot is very little of the point of WHY you would watch something. It might help you discuss elements of it, or determine if it sounds remotely interesting to you, but we experience art because it is, despite appearances, a succinct way of transmitting complex ideas and experiences.
Of course, you cannot summarise something which doesn't exist.
Even with a perfect summary, the source is still going to give something more. Nobody is arguing against that.
If I read the latter description, I would be deeply disappointed. You really need to stretch it to make these "being explored by the poem". It omis more that you can detect these topics if you want to, but they are more of "present a little".
While the former one is quick plot review.
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?
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.
I don’t know if i would want such thing as a tribe. Reviews are great though unless ai generated. IMHO the internet as a source of valueable information is at risk.
There are more great books written before 2022 than a person could read in a lifetime. Stick with those.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> Do schools not ask kids to read out loud in class anymore?
They did when I was at school. But it was not so often, not often enough to get good at it if you weren't already.
And I don't think I'm good at it. Every so often, I find myself reading Wikipedia excerpts out loud for people around when some question comes up and we want an answer. When I do this, suddenly it feels like time slows down, I feel like I sound dull, and everything. I guess I could improve if I were to do it more frequently.
I think I do read relatively slowly, but doing it out loud doesn't help, and that also doesn't prevent me from reading a page of text for myself if it's worth it. I would not engage in unbounded out loud reading.
I could write cursive when I was in school - my handwriting is shit because I write maybe 2-3 times a year since school - so 15 years now ? I went to recitation competitions (not sure what the exact English translation is) when I was in elementary school. I struggled reading children's books for my kids because I almost never read out loud anymore. Then I stopped struggling after I was doing it for a while.
So reading out loud is just a bad test of reading ability.
For whatever reason I could never do that. We did it in school and something about the pressure made it impossible for me to read things smoothly even though, reading in my mind to myself things felt smooth. It's the same with typing. I suddenly can't type if someone standing over my shoulder watching me. It makes no sense. It could be my best friend but it doesn't matter. Suddently I can't type well.
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.
Enlighten me.
To me, GP's point is that people aren't capable of reading. They illustrate this point with an experiment. I'm convinced the experiment doesn't prove their point and that's what I have spent time on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549089#44586441 makes a good point, although I'm not convinced that was the intent of GP.
>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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I’m sorry, but you can’t find five minutes (if even) to read an email? No way your day-to-day life is so completely composed of things demanding your full attention that you don’t have a couple minutes to read an email. You typed out this comment, presumably after reading the thread. Surely you have time if someone you know sent you an email. You could read it in the time it takes to brush your teeth.
I think you're assuming my inbox activity looks like yours, and based on your comment I can assure you it does not.
Work only, I get 300+ per day. They're all valid and most of them go unread, especially the long ones. I also am in meetings most of the day, so email is not my highest priority. I scan and respond where essential, or often CC someone that I can delegate an action/decision to. Like I said, if things get urgent and I've not responded - people can find me other ways.
If email was as much as a priority to me as you want it to be, you're right, I probably wouldn't have time to respond here. I also wouldn't have time to use the restroom or sleep.
To flip the script, why are you composing full page emails? How much time does that take? Are you allergic to the phone? Do you want an answer? Do you want it timely? So on... as the sender in async communication, it's poor taste to jam wall of text infront of someone and have any expectation of when it will be read or acted on (same as the guy in the grocery store mentioned in this thread). The only exception is perhaps if it's from a superior and your job is to prioritize their communications - which of course I do, do that when I scan my inbox. There are people I always read and respond to, the vast majority of people sending me emails are not in that list.
Every day one step closer to the reality of Wall-e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E
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.
While different places define "literate" differently, I've seen figures that say 20% of adults in the USA are functionally illiterate.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
... 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.
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.
What I would have given to have had ChatGPT in college stuck reading Barthes.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.
thankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux, mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever isn't as good as it was in the past.
Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even if windows still allows searching within files (it probably does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.
Yes. Copernic desktop search indexed document content. And it was quick. It's pretty hard to understand that MS still can't do useful search
"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?)
Kind of off topic but what browser are you using?
Google Chrome, so maybe to be expected, but 2.6GB is a lot
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.
Promise of AI: All text will be generated
Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
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.
Will the small web still survive?
As long as there are dorks obsessed with mini painting, trains, odd fish, old knitting patterns, there will be communities and blogs for them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1
I like it
“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 snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?
The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means.
In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college. Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed the reality, but I'm not moving them.
I guess I would not have done much better.
>Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
>Facilitator: >O.K.
>Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere.
What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?
I think in that sentence the fog isn't really that important, it's just an excuse to tell you about the surroundings.
The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.
First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around.
Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around.
Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean.
Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
This seems like something way beyond reading comprehension though. Personally, and this is not a knock on you, but I don't find any of that imagined perception to be interesting/valuable. All this sentence is saying to me is that the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city.
Comprehension is a spectrum that starts somewhere superficial and merely "adequate" but also stretches into deeper literacy/fluency. On one end of the spectrum it is about reading between the lines, but that doesn't mean it's purely subjective nonsense. As for whether it's interesting or valuable, if you want to stay on the surface that's fine, but it's a narrow point of view to imagine that's all that is there.
Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
In general, I think that's a perfectly valid view for you to take. It's not the only one, but it's a valid one.
In specific, this study was a test of reading comprehension, for English majors at a university level. They should be expected to do better with a complicated sentence then "it's really foggy, I guess". Just as I expect someone in film school to be able to give a more detailed review of a movie than "It was pretty good, you should go see it", even though that may be a perfectly acceptable review if a friend gives that to me.
Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.
Anecdata: I found most people don't have an issue with the vocabulary itself but rather their attention spans. From what I've experienced from family members and friends, the younger ones seem to get exasperated by any longer amount of text that isn't in very simple English language.
A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that could actually sit through a whole reading session in her 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.
Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.
One example student in the study does not look it up and misinterprets "Michaelmas Term" as a person, presumably because it has "Michael" in it. Knowing it is even a time is half the battle.
It’s a helpful detail that Dickens wrote for his Victorian readers. Michaelmas term refers to both the first academic term of the school year and the start of the legal year in the English courts system. Bleak House is about a court case that has gone on so long that nobody knows what it’s about. The case is about an inheritance and has dragged on for so long that the estate itself has been totally wiped out by legal fees. It has ruined lives and continues to ruin them but there is no end in sight even though there’s nothing left but fighting to fight over. It’s an inherited lawsuit and an inherited feud.
Dickens had a lot of issues with the legal system at the time and it was a protest work.
> nothing left but fighting to fight over
Toward the end of the story the fighting does stop when lawyer's fees, which they had been charging to the estate, at last empty it. This is announced publicly in court, and the attorneys respond by flinging their piles of paper into the air, one of a few comic scenes in the novel.
FYA, this modus vivendi is still being practiced -- see the litigation around the estate of O.J. Simpson.
How does November help? I don't even remember the academic terms from my college 10 years ago, how am I supposed to accurately know how academic terms worked a century ago in England?
Per Wikipedia, Michaelmas term tends to around in mid-December, not in mid-November.
Well then I guess it was an unseasonably warm December that year? Or perhaps the dates have changed? Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that it makes a significant difference to the story.
Sure, but I know what terms are in tis context, and I know what Christmas is. So it's hardly impossible to deduce enough to keep reading.
I'm pretty sure "Michaelmas term" is just a Britishism sill in use today.
They were given a dictionary, and also told they were allowed to look things up on their phone.
I suspect that the unfamiliarity with words like Michaelmas was part of the point.
I.e. What do the students do when reading a book and they come across a word they don't know? Look it up? Deduce it's rough meaning from context? Live with the uncertainty? Get mad and not finish the text?
The explanation is nowadays just a tap-and-hold away, however, on a mobile device.
... I guessed it was about some prime minister term ending, maybe he got voted out, or he wasn't elected in his constituency again.
In my defence, I'm not a native speaker
I think it's very reasonable to expect that a majority (if not all) of university students to be able to read this but certainly not the general public.
You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary necessary to parse this piece of text.
As would I. It actually feels very "chat-ish." Two-word thoughts as sentences, etc.
Like how I text. To my wife. Whenever we're on our computers in different locations. No need to edit. She gets it. So do you.
I for one absolutely agree that
reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.
Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously deadly when it floods.
Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0].
The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy.
[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
That's not unreadable, it's captivating!
When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole.
The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture.
On another note: What are horse blinkers?
Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs
The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry...
Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages.
Summarizers will shorten this to something like "It was very muddy in London." Very lossy compression.
So it opens with a tone poem.
Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
Short sentences, too. Some people like to ramble on for quite a few lines before reaching for a period.
I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it.
Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird.
Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture.
Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently also means the beginning of the legal year.
The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context.
Is it the easiest thing to read? No.
Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?
Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable.
A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms.
The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too.
I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the later paragraphs.
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.
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."
Yep, English majors, and on top of that the study was done in 2015, which is not just pre-ChatGPT but pre-TikTok.
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.
> I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers
Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum in high school is built around reading particular works by particular historical writers. The highlights of nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered in high school (and beyond - some of these people are seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember any works or authors from the nineteenth century would be equivalent to engineering major who can't remember any algebra.
I guess that’s true.
Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of course)—I tutored folks in an “math for non-stem majors” sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer to their material than the math students, who’d all long ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point they started asking about foils, which was pretty confusing (they weren’t looking for anachronistically named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic for applying the distributive property twice, which I’d never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing directly.
I wonder if these college English students have similarly forgotten some names? I guess that’s sort of a long shot. I do think memorization of facts should be avoided, though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the underlying principle into your mental model instead.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Gustav Eiffel? Robert Stephenson? Nikola Tesla? Alexander Graham Bell? Orville and Wilbur Wright? Thomas Edison?
I guess it depends on how much you honour those who lit the way before you.
Ignoring the first three, the rest I've mentally bucketed into "inventor" and not "engineer". And that's assuming I have them associated with the right century - definitely would have excluded the Wright brothers anyway because of that.
> The aircraft we fly today is the same design as the Wright Brothers. They solved the control problem. They did wind tunnel studies. And yet you claim they're "not engineers."
As the joke goes, 'I want some of what he's smoking.' Just. Wow.
When did I ever claim they're not engineers? I said I mentally bucketed them into "inventor" instead of "engineer". People can be more than one thing at once, it's just not the association I have in my mind, so they don't come to mind when I try to think of engineers.
FWIW I (incorrectly, I guess) thought of Tesla and Edison as early 20’th century instead of 19’th.
The Wright brothers just barely squeeze by the “19’th century” bar.
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...
To add to the depression, I wonder how many respondents thought that "nineteenth century" == 1900s.
Wow, this really makes me think. Thanks for making that up and commenting it.
Ain't It Awful
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.
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).
Someone posted it below and it doesn't seem that difficult. One old use of the word "wonderful" was all that threw me off
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...
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.
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.
To be fair, the opening is exactly the sort of clunky writing paragraph that you can normally feel free to skip.
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?
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.
Right but we're mixing things
* Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning?
* Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures?
* Does the reader know a bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?
To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second. It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate.
An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.
> Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now
This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.
How are these statements contradictory?
They aren't. A run-on, 70 word sentence for example wasn't easier to store in your head, or not require the occasional second read-through back then . Readers then still had to go through all of that. This "it's just outdated" idea is employed primarily to hand-wave poor literacy performance and reading requirements.
Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and has a lot of the same difficulty, but people don't call it 'outdated' or treat it like a foreign language. These are just books you have to read slower than a news article, and that's alright, but there's a fine line between needing more time and not being able to get through it. That study showed it conclusively.
Yes, he was popular, and his works still weren't as easy to read as some of his contemporaries and many authors before and after him. That's not nonsense, that's reality.
> 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?
> 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.
To understand the passage and what follows, it is actually important to know what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is. And to be clear, it's not an "inn" in the standard modern usage of the term, but rather a rather a professional association for lawyers.
You can figure out from later context that it's some kind of legal institution with an associated court. The students were also allowed to look things up: "Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource" [0]
Yes, agreed completely. You can get a lot (but not everything) from context. The text will be clearer if you look up unfamiliar terms (which they were allowed to do). But if you gloss over Lincoln's Inn Hall as "obviously some kind of inn", you won't have a full understanding of what follows.
Unfortunately, from the study, most of the subjects had no idea there was anything to do with a court or lawyers by the end of the passages at all.
Wait until they encounter Shakespeare!
This gave a literal LOL
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.
The only tricky thing about the Dickens bit is that it uses that archaic meaning of “divers” that I’m only familiar with because of the Joanna Newsom time travel/romance/trench warfare/birds album.
God, I'm so happy I saw this live in concert. She is incredible.
I don't see what's missing from Claude's summary. Claude doesn't repeat the word "loom", but does explain that Dickens is comparing the appearance of the lamps to that of the sun.
"AI can't understand this metaphor" isn't criticizing the thing you think it's criticizing.
Comparison is not metaphor. Ironically metaphor is actually something LLMs are somewhat adept at picking up on provided there's enough training data saying there's a metaphor there, for a seminal work.
Whatever you may wish to call it, simile or metaphor, it's a little silly to complain about it being referred to as a metaphor, considering that similes are a subset of metaphor, even if they often aren't taught this way to children. Also, in common speech and literature, what would be taught as similes to children are almost universally just referred to as metaphors.
> 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.
This has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times.
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?
Wow, that's crazy!
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.
> 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.
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.
Distribution has opened up, so it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison when looking a # of books published statistic
I have a friend that published a kids book over the course of a weekend, it's for sale on Amazon. It's sold hardly any copies but it's been published
They’re writing in iMessage, Instagram, and ChatGPT.
But not in paragraphs. Their written language in those forums is short form sentences that are a mix of emojis and almost randomly inserted words that are more akin to honorifics sprinkled in to convey tone "no cap" "frfr"
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.
> 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.
The article has several paragraphs addressing these points...
He almost certainly didn't read it....
> 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.
Joyce would be proud :P
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%
Are 13 year olds reading on the Internet though? My experience working with the youth is that they consume video, not written material
You have no idea what teens are doing, it is mostly video all day long.
Evidence?
The issue is reading comprehension. Not the mere ability to read.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the beautiful things about the human experience is that there can be multiple points. The greatest works of art can be appreciated in many ways, and the viewer's perspective can add a lot of richness that goes beyond the original intent. Even in a standard white collar work environment where we want to make single points very crisply there is a real art to framing things and choosing the right words to motivate different individuals with different contexts to do the right things to row the boat in the same direction.
I think AI is useful for sifting through high volumes of data to get the gist, but I don't really count it as it's own modality. It is by definition a watered down version of the training data that produced it, it lacks the human spark that makes content worthy of attention and analysis.
Not everyone "misses" the point. People can take what they want and choose to discard the rest. Consider, for example, watching beach volleyball not for the thrill of the sport but to ogle the players. That they're also engaged in serious competition is not lost on anyone - the audience just doesn't care.
Some authoritarians also like vigilante violence and find it in The Punisher. Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.
Many people are perfectly capable of getting e.g. the moods, visuals, themes, ideas conveyed by poetry, and it simply doesn't match their taste. That doesn't make them morons, and to imply otherwise is snobbery.
> Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.
Everyone does that. In star trek, race determines your temperament and skills. You do not see many calm Klingon scientists anywhere outside of their planet. Start Trek is also, basically, about humans being overall morally superior.
You can see whatever you want to see in the star trek.
>Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.
I can enjoy fiction that doesn't match my worldview... and it doesn't change my worldview. I am immune to propaganda without the inability to appreciate it, or temporarily be entertained by it. And it has fascinated me my entire life that others must be molded into something new from fiction, or run screaming from it with their ears plugged up with nothing in between.
Perhaps the rest of you can do this too, and you're merely being ungenerous in your assumption that those whose politics you disagree with have so little psychological fortitude that they're incapable of the same. Or maybe you can't, and it scares you that they can.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd be intrigued to hear the argument fully flushed out for once. The Dalio worship after the "principles" exposés is baffling but at the same time he does appear objectively successful.
I think his game is no longer about developing analytical skill to be the best investor, but becoming the person who has access to high level people and gets actionable information on an international scale before others.
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.
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
The real red pill is always in the comments/blog posts:
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-pet...
> You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. > Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers > [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama
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.
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.
For many people, paywalls may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.
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.
> 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.
I don't know, maybe putting a paygate in front of every piece of substantive editorial content isn't helping.
How do you expect them to make a living? News and magazines were always behind a paygate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, it does show. Old people language is more rich than young people language.
But if a kid asks you something using their language, you won't understand either. And given ABC test you would select wrong answer as well, despite reading 1000 books a year.
So it's not that simple. Times have changed, yes. Like they always do. My father's grandparents probably knew things and did things my father doesn't know (/ how to do). The grandparents could say: "Times have changed" as well.
So that is pointless although funny anecdote (IMHO ;) ). I don't know this romanian expression but "leaves for dogs" made thinking when I read that.
Also, take a note that reading itself is relatively new skill when we are talking about average person (75 years? Maybe, depending on the region). So if I were to engage into this topic I would not focus on books per se, but a communication (/ knowledge transfer) as a whole. I guess that would however get me (us) to entirely different conclusions, because stereotypically reading books is associated with something smart even if one reads harlequins exclusively.
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…
> 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.
> 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!
"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.
too long - anyone has the tldr?
did they really just paywall an article about how nobody reads things anymore?
Sign up for Libby, get free New Yorker articles from library. Remember libraries?
tldr
[flagged]
It's worth noting that for most of human history, all writing has been behind a paywall.
For most of the history in context of the article, libraries have been a thing
Yes, but its only in the last hundred or so years that public access libraries have been the norm.
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.
In the age of LLMs vacuuming up all content and deriving all the economic value from it, can you blame them?
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).
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.
I don't see how they can crack down on this. Summaries don't infringe copyright, from what I can tell.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's trivial to get an LLM to write a comment of this kind of quality. Good writing means nothing anymore.
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.
Now ask how old working a sedentary 9-5 is
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.
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...
The article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even before "AI".
Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...
Right. But you don’t think the giant education gap right before AI isn’t the primary reason?
Oh dang, we were all worried about time traveling AI, right?
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.
Sorry but that’s still not relevant. The article takes a totally different view on what’s happening. Other sides could be valid too but they’re not part of the article.
Agreed that society deciding to "educate" children with iPads instead of books would lead to unforeseen consequences for their cognitive skills.
Just install Bypass Paywalls Clean extension. This is the author: https://x.com/Magnolia1234B
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.
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.
I don't think you read the article at all...
