When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like it did with an adblocker on, but eventually: https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm
Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.
Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.
But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
In the drug analogy I am saying most addicts know about rehab. The conspiricy isn't hiding all the NA groups.
Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that by accident does everything to not talk about subjects that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive, emotionial pulp of no relevance.
How do you do that when you
1. were never taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest held memes
2. were brainwashed by endless affirmation via infotainment
3. are living in an infotainment environment were half of your countrymen believe things like "the election was stolen"?
r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.
It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant:
> Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
- Alanis Obomsawin
This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years.
Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
It's a metaphor (though in many parts of the world it's a simple fact); but yeah, it could be global some day. I wouldn't put it past us. We've lost countless species already.
We've been abysmal to trees. If we were to keep losing forest at our current global rate we'd lose the last tree in 400-800 years (though tbf this is decelerating right now).
New England has more tree cover than 200 years ago - great. Europe too. Is 200 years ago a good reference point though? Isn't that when we chopped like 80% of our forests down for industrialization?
Anyway, so the centers of Empire are green(ish). How's the Amazon doing though? How's South-East Asia? Central Africa?
And our new forests - are they old growth and diverse, or monoculture Sitka spruce? Organic, or doused with glyphosate?
And then there's the climate, which we are fucking up faster than scientists predicted... Can trees adapt in time? ... Would trees survive nuclear holocaust?
I'm not saying Bladerunner was a documentary. But we're on course for catastrophe, no doubt about it; and the relentless pursuit of ever more capital via externalized costs is why.
- things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job"
- people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be true.
"Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here.
Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value.
FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc.
Did they ever speak out against torture, or illegal war? How much? Did they ever go into the long term advantages of Jill Stein's economic plans; or Bernie's? How much?
The fact that we spent over $8 trillion in a murderous money laundering scheme should have been front page news every day for years. The costs of our incredible and historic inequality are rarely discussed, and if they are, it's in the most limp manner imaginable. The opportunity cost of all this fuckery, from a rational economic perspective, is mind blowing.
The Overton Window is now looking onto bipartisan genocide, after decades of bipartisan illegal war and an extreme agenda of Islamophobia.
> people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases
People like Musk buy news sources to spread their biases. Same for Murdoch, Turner, Bezos, etc.
Such an important (and often unpopular) followup question.
I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe. Compare this to the tabloids, which don't charge for online access and make money by peddling particular business or political interests - mostly shady business, I think most would agree. I'd therefore trust FT on the facts, albeit probably not for wide coverage.
No ulterior motive? I really don't know about that.
They're better than most, because they generally tell the truth - a shockingly low bar - but it's a specific type of truth, as seen from a specific and very narrow window, from a deliberate vantage point.
Always viewing the world from that specific window belies a motive, conscious or not, to maintain a highly destructive status quo. They are not seeing the forest for the trees, while writing factual and detailed reports on the least consequential tree bark facts.
Which is fine, if tree bark facts are your bag, I guess - but I'm more concerned about the rapidly deteriorating forest.
That the worlds premier capitalist publication publishes facts capitalists find useful?
Yes.
Also bears shit in the woods.
That the word reliable was being used to describe the FT.
'Reliable' within a certain narrow context for the people trashing our potential (ie, the capital class)? Yes.
'Reliable' within a broader context, where we get to the root causes of our catastrophic inequality, our over extraction of resources, our environmental destruction, our war mongering leaders, etc? Also yes; but in precisely the wrong way. They can be relied on to support whatever makes the yacht class more money in the next few quarters.
This matters because corporate media has been truly complicit in much of our impending doom/s; the FT being far from an exception.
Handy tip: If someone's point seems very obvious, like where bears shit, it's usually worth reading the comment again to see if you've missed something. Ie in this case, the entire second half of my comment.
They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else. Something being important doesn't mean it should be written about everywhere.
Financial news from a specific and narrow viewpoint. There are others.
This is the third time I've said it now. It would be nice to know where the confusion is coming from. Is it simply that many people can't imagine any alternate view of finance news, other than that sold by FT?
What if, back in the slavery days, a newspaper reported solely from the perspective of slaveholders, never slaves. They only printed 'facts' - how much a slave could be expected to depreciate by age, which regions produced the hardest working slaves, etc.
Would this be a 'reliable' paper? Would it just be 'financial news'? Would it simply be a 'premier capitalist publication publishing facts capitalists find useful'? Well, yes, in a way.
And that's exactly what financial newspapers back then did. They traded in dry, money making facts - in support of a deeply exploitative and unsustainable system. Always from one particular perspective - the slaveholder's; that of the ownership class.
'Reliable' isn't a word I would have chosen to describe them.
In more modern times, FT takes huge ad money from fossil fuel companies, cheer-leads the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, has never met a neoliberal/neocon since that they didn't love; and takes the view of the 0.1% 99.9% of the time. Almost completely heedless of the permanent damage that is being done to all life on Earth as a result, except as a side note in an article about how apocalypse might affect your portfolio.
Will any of this sink in? Can you change your mind, or at least the subject? Let's see.
Have you contemplated such possibility?
Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow? Like Zorg's little speech [0] about the benefits of destruction (the broken window fallacy)?
You said they are dodging 'genuine understanding'.
I am saying you aren't the final word on what 'genuine understanding of everything most important' is.
In other words - you are using lots of words to say 'I want others to do more of the stuff I want them to do and less of the stuff they are doing because the stuff I want them to do is obviously good and the stuff they are doing is obviously less good'.
Thing is, almost everyone thinks this. Given that almost everyone already thinks this way and the world isn't what you want it to be, maybe something about such a worldview is off. Or maybe we just need more of people like you in positions of power and you'll fix it :) Where have I heard that one before?
And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption, or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal gain, that's not obviously perverse to you; it's just one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
Well, pick your prophet; pick your genius; they all say the same thing:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
- Jesus.
"By his craving for riches the foolish man slays himself, as if he were slaying others."
- Buddha
"The mutual rivalry for piling up of worldly things diverts you, until you visit the graves."
- The Qur'an
"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
- Socrates
"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
- Seneca
"The more you have, the more you want. The more you have, the less you are."
- Tolstoy
"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
- Einstein
"Wealth is like seawater: the more you drink, the thirstier you become."
- Schopenhauer
"A small terrace by the mountain stream, living at ease, free from the burdens of the world — this is better than the glory of an emperor."
- Zhuangzi
Etc, etc, etc.
Some people, really, truly, have a genuine understanding of this concept. And many, probably most incredibly wealthy people, with every possible opportunity, can't grasp it for the life of them. That's not really "my opinion"; it's the opinion of anyone worth listening to.
Pretty much, yes.
Yesterdays vapid conspicuous consumption is tomorrows minimum living standard.
Three meals a day every day forever?
Even medieval kings had to go on a diet when famine struck.
The way of life of our billionaires is threatening all life on the planet, particularly the poorest [0]. There might not be a living standard if we don't fix this issue.
0 - https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-mo...
Billionaires emit a bit more, but not that much more.
Note the very disingeneous comment here:
> tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments
"Private jets" and "polluting investments" were in the same sentence as if they were in the same ballpark, but its the investments that count for almost everything and they would be polluting regardless if the billionaires owned them or not.
That's not "a bit more". That's insane.
And there's absolutely nothing disingenuous about it, because the article clearly states:
> the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.
> Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
... I don't know why this isn't convincing to you, but it's not Oxfam's fault.
Lets assume all people when given the opportunity will do what is in their own best interests first.
The less power you have, the more working with others is in your own best interest.
The more wealth you have, the more power you have and the less you _need_ to work with others to achieve what you want or need, so you have an increased ability to weigh what is best for you vs what is best for everyone.
At some point the wealth/power split is so much that you can effectively stop caring about what everyone else wants and pursue what you want and what benefits you.
So while they may have better information, they aren't incentivized to decisions that are less harmful to everyone.
> Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
All of those can be leveraged for profit if one is cynical and self-serving enough. Most of 'them' that fall into these categories know to some degree the actions they take are harmful to others, and frankly they don't care. Either in their own self-interest, or deluded interests of whatever group they identify with.
I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.
On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.
I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.
They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.
I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.
People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]
Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]
We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.
This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.
What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.
[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billion...
The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of prominence from there.
That’s fundamentally different from inheriting power even if you’re a dunce as kings once did.
Today he's also a fascist grifter who's entered into politics. For some reason usians don't revolt when their political system elects rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right, so I'm hoping it'll turn into something like a kingdom that they find it in themselves to overturn.
No accounting for taste
> born into ... wealth
It's a very minor thing in the big picture to be born into a 3rd world country like South Africa's top 1%.
> criminal wealth
His dad likely had some dodgy dealings, but there's every indication that he made the bulk of his money legally. Anyway, how does that reflect on Musk? Did we go back to "sins of the fathers"?
> organisations he ends up in needs to protect themselves from.
Ah yes, it's pure coincidence that so many of these organizations go on to absolutely kick ass. Let's check in on the EV situation at, say, GM or BMW in an alternate universe without Tesla. Or on the progress at ULA or Blue Origin.
> fascist
I don't think you understand what that word means. A key part of fascism is unlimited government control - the exact opposite of what he wants.
> grifter
He sells stuff? I guess that's bad in your eyes?
> who's entered into politics
How very dare he!?
> rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right,
Nice linking those three things together.
Mistaking first-mover advantage and access to extreme amounts of funding for "kick ass" is quite weird.
No, that's not a characteristic of fascism. He's impressed by and promotes nazis, maintains his wealth through corporativism, and so on.
No, it's that he makes wild promises, takes money and then don't deliver on them that makes him a grifter.
First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his support of Trump and DOGE, we can conclude that he's the opposite of a fascist and wants to reduce the state. He's much more Millei than Mussolini. This is so elementary I'm a little confused as to why I have to spell it out.
Here's some more homework for you: [1]. Words like Nazi and Fascist and Communist have meanings. If we want to have a civilized society, we must first respect the meanings of words so that we can have a conversation.
Second: name a Nazi that Musk likes. Before you say Trump, here's Trump's Fine People speech. Watch the whole thing, then tell me he's a Nazi. Then also keep in mind the massive "Trump calls Nazis Fine People" hoax the media has been banging on about ever since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKbFA7HW-U
Here's one of him disavowing the KKK many times over a long period: https://x.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/897112536574828544
Third, Musk is known for making wild promises, many of which are as yet undone. Nobody would care who he is if that was all there is to him. But some of his wild promises are real and part of everyday life.
Fourth, if you think he wins due to extreme funding, go read the stories of Zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. All of the above teetered on the brink of nonexistence due to being bootstrapped by Musk who was then strapped for cash.
The state is much, much more "all-embracing" today than what Mussolini could ever have imagined, and has been for a long time, decades.
Musk wants a more total influence on the world, he doesn't want anyone to be able to say something negative about him, for example. He wants to eradicate large swathes of people, explicitly by making it impossible to talk about them and in practice it will likely boil down to the destruction of their bodies once that fails.
You're obviously sympathetic to this neo-fascist movement. Let's hope you'll manage to leave, because by now it looks like the resistance to it has to get violent.
Today?
He incessantly spews anti-inspirational anti-rational anti-social and anti-business diarrhea to an alarming and epic degree. He drives Twitter/X’s business logic like a drunk going the wrong way on a highway, seemingly intent on hitting every guardrail he can find.
So far SpaceX and perhaps to a lesser degree Tesla are getting by on the deep talent he gathered in better times.
He is an unusual person.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are military labs behind plausible deniability, dual-use aprons. Hence they're run to a larger extent by people who aren't him and he works like a neat distraction for outsiders.
Much like Thiel he doesn't show any "deep talent". That's something other people are bringing to the organisations they're part of.
Dramatic exits after successful acquisitions are common. You have to earn “failures” like that.
That created SpaceX’s seed capital.
(You can’t have it both ways. If he had convinced the US to bankroll him, that would have been serious business acumen.)
Minor success on hard problems, with a shoe string budget, and an attractive business plan (vertical integration, fast-failure iteration, reusability) got investment capital flowing.
More successes, more capital.
Result: They changed the economics of space launches & save money for all their customers, including NASA & the military.
No resemblance to nepo operations or results. See Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
$ billions of dollars burn with each SLS launch. Massive delays & cost plus overruns. For now.
There's been a lot of reporting about how SpaceX is keeping Musk's influence at a minimum. If you go looking you'll also find video from interviews with Musk in that role where he isn't talking from a script and comes across as a clueless high schooler.
Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
I don’t like one-sided trolls who are insecure that some other people are exceptional?
Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
—
More productively:
I don’t have an axe to grind either way, other than giving credit where it is due, and vice versa.
My original comment reflected both.
He has done some truly incredible work. He earned his success.
Lately, he is a mess with completely different priorities.
I imagine many employees in all his companies are happier when he is not around these days. And would be happy if he stopped posting opinions, given the downstream impact to their brands.
What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
I responded to your pointless, inaccurate and rude conjecture with an equally pointless, rude, and what I assumed was an equally inaccurate conjecture to suggest that perhaps we keep our conversation substantive.
If the sense in that still isn’t clear, you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
> What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
I don’t know how “success” could be any more evident.
But if you believe you see shortcuts that were taken, then perhaps take your insight and do something comparable? Good luck!
I think some people responded to the deluge of slop by clutching out their connection to reality and relying solely on a couple of third parties for their worldview.
There's no point in arguing with someone who looks at Elon Musk and cannot see success because they can only look at him through a thick lens of ideology and tribalism. Five, ten years ago, some these same people probably thought he was in their tribe and idolized him then. Ten years ago, they probably liked Trump and his shows too.
This is why they're being very unspecific and arguing like a child from a position of conviction, "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I've never had a keen eye to people that ride on the labour of other people and take credit for their work. Gossip magazines just don't work on me, and I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
There you go again, making up my back story despite having no idea who I am.
It is rude, but worse than that, a waste of words.
I would insert another whimsical parody, referring back to you, but that somehow threw you last time.
So I will just repeat:
> Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
> you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
--
It isn't controversial, nor should it require a complex justification to say with some confidence, that the richest person on the planet has been "successful". Widely documented synonym: "prosperous", i.e. achieving great wealth.
>> "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I will be more precise and less rhetorical: based on the meanings of the words "successful", "prosperous" and "richest person on the planet" it is as close to a tautology as informal human language allows.
--
> I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
"Progressive" doesn't mean charitable.
As has been pointed out to you already, reading and using words consistent with their widely documented meanings will help you communicate better, and communicate something coherent, beyond simply projecting strong dislike and distrust of Musk.
But, I am sympathetic to that viewpoint as was evident from my first comment.
Musk has not lived up to values he previously espoused. And he routinely demonstrates deep hypocrisy relative to principles he claims to value today.
Any extreme is, by definition, unusual. You don’t need to be a billionaire (which is what the articule you linked to focus on) to be considered powerful or wealthy.
Tellingly, that articles notes that:
> The proportion of those in the list who grew up poor or had little wealth remained constant at roughly 20 percent throughout the same period.
Which suggests that inheriting power and money does make a difference in your chance of success. They continue:
> Most individuals on the Forbes 400 list did not inherit the family business but rather made their own fortune.
But one does not follow from the other. Inheriting a business is not the only way to have a leg up. If you’re well off you have the opportunity to risk going into some venture on your own and fail, because you have a safety net. Furthermore, your affluent family can and probably will make a difference in your business. I’m reminded of a piece of news a while back where a couple of rich kids were bragging they made their company successful “from scratch” but upon further inspection into it was revealed their customers were rich friends of their parents.
Tautology.
> The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group
There is no causal link here.
It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always.
Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.
Saying that solution is not turning back and giving up on digital. It would be same as giving up on printing to embrace a teacher focused learning.
And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?
Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.
I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons.
So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.
This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep.
You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.
Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points, benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem.
This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon, and see that as something that sets you free and puts the onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight into flimsy pseudo-certainty.
It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing books like that, they were accused by more conservative contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it as something to celebrate and explore.
I very well might be wrong. I hope I am, since I can't of any other way to make things work.
I think you may be on to something, but I would also add that maybe you should consider whether prior to the age of 13 may also be a viable range. I think 13 to it depends is when the problem (roughly, the mind/ego "coming into its own", or something like that) manifests.
Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the individual, it undermines all social institutions.
A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth, veracity.
Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it - rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less "unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do you really know about the relation between an LED and covert surveillance.
In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge and maybe to use it in a different way.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-its-ca...
I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with the corpus of works.
In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the next 6 months.
Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to all the journals legally unlike the average person.
It's like juggling three balls in a way: if you can't do it, it isn't necessary to believe you can. So too with knowledge, except it's like a thousand times as hard.
This is a future possibility but it has not yet come to pass, and we can still avoid it. We are not yet adrift in a sea of epistemological relativism where everyone has their own truth, and no objective truth can be discerned. We don't need to succumb to this kind of nihilism. Truth and objective reality are still discernable and approachable. Philosophical objections to the Truly objective viewpoint are not the limiting factor.
"Everything is just a narrative" is the cry of those who don't have truth on their side. The current state of mass media is the result of their cries becoming louder. We don't have to go along with it.
I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
</old man yells at cloud>
"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.
"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.
In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.
Not just the critical part described in an article
E.g watching developer write software can show you things about OS usage, IDE usage, automation and other tricks and habbits
Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that theoretical education leaves open.
Or constant stream of information gives them the illusion of staying informed
Also, "podcasts" go quite a bit back : since it became practical to record radio (wire already, or did that only start with cassette tapes ?)
TV got that too with it's own tapes, but the portability and diversity was much worse until digital video got cheap enough.
In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.
It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to become successful because nobody has the reading or concentration skills. When I was a child I taught myself English by playing Planescape Torment.
Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.
The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.
Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?
Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.
When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.
I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing words.
Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to focus their effort.
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.
No wonder therapists are raking it in and short supply.
When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.
For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test ever. Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe. Everything was problems, proofs, or essays.
Really I spend my days shovelling PDFs around.
Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.
> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].
Proof needed. You can't just say that.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.
The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.
And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.
On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation, because more than just the test has changed since that time. For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are the present-day students being taught to a test from four decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would need to control for in order to accurately compare performance over time. Although there are certainly people who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance. What do people need to know now, and what books should be read by students in order to learn it?
But can pupils from 30 or 40 years ago pass today's exams?
The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.
The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.
You can connect with other learners, you can ask questions on forums.
1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.
2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.
3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.
We all know students with good grades who struggle at exams
Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your observations of your younger relatives?
Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years spent mastering' with LLMs.
Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.
Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...
Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?
There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.
I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.
From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.
If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.
The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.
And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper. Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be a good enough compromise.
I number the notebook, and write the start date at first page. Then I number the pages as I go, and date every page.
When the notebook finishes, I remove the binding, scan it at 600DPI, store it as a PDF.
I'll be training a local Tesseract installation with my hand writing one day, but I'm not there. However, these notebooks saved the day more than once in their current form.
I'm using smart devices since Palm/Handspring era. Nothing can replace the paper for me, and I don't want to change my ways from now on. So this is the method I use for quite some time.
The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done
Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?
From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/m...
PISA is a standardized test conducted by OECD for International Student Assessment. It's homepage is located at [0], alongside with datasets for all previous tests, and plethora of material.
So, you can download the data, look at the questions in any language you prefer, do your own analysis.
I'll just reiterate that, my personal experience mirrors the article. Extreme reliance of smart devices and technologies like conversational LLMs reduce the cognitive ability and deep thinking capacity tremendously. Children and people become interfaces to these devices they use. They just delegate all their thinking to these devices and live a much hollower life.
> excellent grades
have nothing to do with interiority -- the main thrust of the article
The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll eventually reach a point where you need information that is only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.
There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about how a record number of university students in Sweden are struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of reading and extracting the necessary information needed from the textbooks.
You could as well have written that you know young people who get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their school papers.
> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
I’m only familiar with gauze in the context of first-aid kits and other medical usage so I’d appreciate hearing your interpretation of “ephemeral gauze”.
I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)
There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours to the library/store to return the old one and download a new one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero, you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you took the time to pick out.
Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?
Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth.
That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed.
https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...
The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers.
It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior.
And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1].
[1]: https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-pr...
The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.
This hits the nail on the head. In the end, I am trusting other people to do the experiments and reporting the findings.
I can regurgitate a lot of stuff about science, but in the end I believe it because I grew on the scientist side of the fence. If you look at conspiracy theories, the thing they always do is come up with a reason not to believe in the established authorities.
During the "there are flat-earthers" fad I realized that for the majority of people it doesn't matter whether it's flat or not, the question whether it's flat or round actually only arises when they need to perform an action which depends on the Earth's shape, which is never, because most people are not pilots, not astronauts, etc., so for them, the model of Earth being flat works perfectly well.
It's the same as people saying that Earth is round for most intents and purposes, and then a smart-ass saying "actually, it's not a perfectly round ball". Yes, it's not a perfectly round ball, but we're discussing time zones here, not local weather patterns.
Most people say that Earth is round not because they believe it's the correct model for their use case, but because they want to belong to the club of people perceived as smart, and that's the view expected of a "smart" person. The flat-earthers perfectly uncovered this charade, by showing that most people just parrot "Earth is round" because that's the social consensus which just so happens to be true.
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
Its probably more useful to distinguish between foreign educated vs born here.
Interestingly the last stats I remember seeing about ESL students is they tend to out-perform english students in a number of subjects depending on the age group, so factoring them out might lower the overall stats and show an even worse trend among native born english speaking American students.
What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?
If you spend a decade or three learning and perfecting your trade, and spend a decade away from it without practicing, you'll be rusty (at best) regardless of what the job actually is
This fuels everything from shipbuilding to the military industrial complex - you practice and improve by constantly doing and refining, and your nation can end up a world-leader in designing microprocessors or building supersonic fighters
It also challenges the belief that what education needs right now is disruption.
In my work, I was in touch with families with multiple children at home, no computers, maybe one or two phones, and no broadband connection. The kids, for all intents and purposes, just lost two years of education.
Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when the conventionally powerful people own the content producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not simple at all, who to listen to.
This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged.
So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms.
Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
>Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.
Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise.
But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like:
>The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
[1] https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-li...
In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'"
In short, Cronus eats his children.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
Let alone the median general public.
Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News isn’t to be informed for most people. It is for entertainment like any other fodder content shoehorned into some free minutes of your day. And that’s ok because as long as some technical people need to actually get things done, there is good information and data out there for you to actually learn about the world. It just will be in some dry .gov website or some other source perhaps instead of distilled down to a 2 min article written to a 6th grade reading level with a catchy headline on cnn.com, but thats OK. You will learn to appreciate the dryness and technical language.
Then there was the great culling of newspapers and magazines. It was probably the last thing longer than a paragraph that my dad actually read consistently. They mostly went online, stopped being delivered and he was forced off of the reading experience. Sure, you can seek things like that out but it was serendipitous, they got less funding, raises prices, fox continued to foxify, i don't know that he's really read anything since! I, myself, am trying with some difficulty to begin reading more. I need the concentration back
IMO, the entire problem comes from this one lie. But you see... a lot of people wants this propaganda machine.
Also, nowadays you can stream deep journalism that people can adjust to their time availability. We usually call those "documentaries". Most of the stuff that carries that name is psychotic garbage too, but informative ones do exist.
Even if the announcers were reading complex fan fiction stories they would still need to break it up into tiny chunks.
The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it?
1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.
2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.
Or democracy will perish eventually.
- News reporting is straightforward insofar as requiring a code. Opinion about news is where it gets messy - if someone has a TV or radio show where they render their opinions or thoughts about news events, that's first amendment territory.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "effective":
- Journalism probably must be scalably funded to scalably exist. We see currently that people are not willing to do that and that opinion heads pervade the "news and information" space. So requiring compliance to a code in order to profit off of journalism doesn't work for the same reason minimum wage doesn't really work - people can just choose not to interact with code-compliant journalism much like companies can just not hire people.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates both the above assertions "simple" and "effective" at once.
- You cannot separate any board of X from political interests, which are much more important if commercial interests are explicilty separated from X.
> Or democracy will perish eventually.
None of the above counters or invalidates this statement.
You take it too static. If you are waiting for the type-safe, leak free hammered approach, you will achieve nothing.
I want you to take this approach to get you going in the right direction.
Opinion pieces
Journalism probably must be scalabe
You cannot separate any board of X from political interests
A peculiar, mindset has been programmed that ethics in society is defined in what what terms the lawyer wrote. A good society is all about what you collectively allow or disallow, no scheme, no law can perfectly defeat all bad actors all the time.
The social part of "society" is an activity. If you as normal people don't show up, then it will be a Murdoch party.
___
* independent from but financed by the state
The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).
For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.
Strange that religion isn't mentioned in the article.
Religion is the bedrock of epistemological 'collapse'.
From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.
In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made us dumber in a real sense.
Well said. For the act of reading digital origin changes the quality but only in minor ways. What we all failed to anticipate we’re the gross effects of segmentation, disintegration, infinite duplication of media.
> The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the past when faced with this problem.
In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year.
Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.
[0] http://www.alpinist.com/ [1] https://www.surfersjournal.com/
It’s so fucking toxic. And I’m well aware there are gems in the museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers of gift shop TikTok shit (and it’s plausible that YouTube will be Alphabet’s undoing because YouTube is great for education and a well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a dockyard crane).
Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low capital gains are rape) can’t cope: it’s no longer just implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis, society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a successful match “churn”, and just every godawful thing.
The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for the “best version of the argument”.
Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form in charge of anything worth a billion dollars.
There are gems, it’s not all garbage, but if every smartphone on the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis.
And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP astrology says things are.
The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable, and not the content.
This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books. It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet.
The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed.
Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed out how long form content trains concentration, short and long term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.
Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card? You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading experience can then be totally offline as you describe.
Oh no, that’s just… why?
At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.
I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
I'd also like to note that, while the printed book is certainly not perfect at staying through the ages - something like stone tablets are probably best for that - it's a lot more reliable than online things. Maybe that'll change, but for now, tech companies go out of business a lot more frequently than floods or fires or other disasters strike the average house. And while, if Simon and Schuster go out of business, that doesn't do a thing to the books you have purchased from them, if Amazon goes out of business, there's no guarantee any of your Kindle will be readable anymore.
As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).
Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often.
The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.
I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.
Can printed books save us?
I admit I oftentime rejoice that printing felt out of fashion, so the printed books that are left are saved from the progress of psyops and the invasion of AI, which may make it easier for future generation(s?) to see through the blindfold of fantasies that will be setup for them.
The article site 1984 as an illustration of how printed books can help resist surveillance. Well, it did not turn out that great for the main character of that book.
Books are a sedative not a cure.
That's a great question.
The answer is very well known. It started both.
In fact, China was just fading away from a very similar boom when Europe started expanding. And the Otomans have had their own boom some centuries before.
And China did develop a mechanical press, and decided to control an censor it too. But I don't think the GP is correct on using that as a strong cause.
I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain.
Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'.
When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.
Esteemed by whom?
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.
Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.
But I don't have a way to square that perspective with what the original commenter suggested about "psychological obliteration" and "addiction akin to gambling or heroin"
People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions. They're clearly not consuming or addictive in the same way as those others things, where people often make explicit wantonly destructive choices in service to their addiction.
And realistically, that they're a different kind of risk with a different kind of impact may make them even more dangerous from a health-of-society perspective, because we don't have great cultural insight or hygeine practices to deal with them. If we want to change that, we need to recognize that they don't represent the same danger we're used to.
So I'm not dismissing that they're bad. I'm just dismissing the original commenters' deeply strained and distracting characterization.
If someone is paying, the transaction, by construction reinforces the psychological boundaries that obliteration eliminates. So I think not paying is part of it, just like addicts ignore the (perhaps partially non monetary) price of their behavior.
To me, I do not reminisce or think about tiktoks / instagram posts having an impact on my life or how I think or how I interact with others. Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read. I kind of know this, as I'm thinking about books I read in highschool over 20 years ago at the moment.
I suppose they give me things to think about beyond the moment I'm reading them, they make me feel things I otherwise wouldn't etc. It's possible for these things in media like movies, and even tiktok too I would imagine.
The reverse is also possible for books to be junk that you read and enjoy in the moment but soon forget.
But I also think the algorithm / profit motive behind tiktok and social media in general tends to mean that it's more likely to be junk, and it's not the person's fault who gets pulled into that. They're brutally effective skinner boxes, imo. Just like some games (mmos and now live service for even shooters).
There's something missing in the current media landscape that the old one did have, which was finality. You read a book, it's over. Similar with older movies, but now we have a bit of the "keep up with the starwars or marvel" thingy which is a bit live service like if you think about it. A constant desire to make folks feel like they have to keep up. Yeah things had sequels before, so I'm probably just waxing nostalgic here.
I'm rambling, sorry, just wanted to share some of my current thoughts.
I'm sure if tiktok didn't exist, these folks would be putting on 24/7 soap operas instead. The desire for a background thing to passively consume has likely always existed. Be it radio, whatever.
The algorithm does seem to be ruthless these days though, god if I know what I mean by that.
> Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read
Exactly what I was thinking. I can still tell you about the first novel I read, first trilogy, favorite books, least favorite, and also each of those per genre. I can tell you what was going on in my life at the time.
The only thing I can say about social media posts are that I have a handful of vague memories of times when someone I knew or knew of would post something that made me realize they had a side I didn’t know of, and not in a good way.
I’m reminded of a quote I read recently, paraphrased: social media connects limbic systems, not prefrontal cortexes. I might take issue with the pure dichotomous nature of that statement, but I think it holds generally.
TV and ticktock don’t need 1. You can interact with a remote or you scrolling-thumb but interaction is not required to consume.
2. Isn’t a necessity neither but people do use TV, ticktock or music to "empty their mind" by thinking to nothing else but the consumption flow. You can do that with reading, but that’s not an experience people usually like and they come back to the place their mind left.
So there's a point here that TikTok is competing for leisure time that in its absence has a better chance of being imaginative but I think that undersells the creativity of social media to a degree.
Long-form writing ask us to choose a subject and then focus deeply and deliberately on it. It's more demanding and more rewarding.
I'd like to say I'm astounded when I hear other people visit other worlds when they read, but really that whole idea is so foreign to me, it might as well be a complete lie. I have no thread in which to pull on to begin to imagine it. I chalk it up to aphantasia, but my point is that not everyone processes and interacts with the world in the same way you might.
"dry list" was your description, not mine. But also, no. Take the common example;
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
You don't have to imagine a picture of shoes, nor of a for sale sign to go... "oh, shit...".
Or even even that's too far to grasp... consider the melody of happy song, or a sad song. I assume you don't imagine a piano to figure out which it is?
I don’t have to imagibe baby shoes to understand what they are, or what happened, but if I read ‘baby shoes’ there’s definitely an image of small shoes appearing in my mind (constantly morphing, because the description doesn’t give me anything to go off).
If I read ‘sad song’, some variation of a sad song will play in my mind.
Of course often you read many of those things in sequence, and the mental scene constructs itself as you learn more.
If you read quickly it’s a bit vague, not enough time to truly think about it, but it’s there. At least for me.
Does your mind conjure no images while reading this?
I'm not the person you're replying to but the answer, for me, depends on what you really mean by conjuring images. Very technically no, I see no images for this but I don't know if that is truly the whole point of what you're asking.
I mostly understand what is happening but I also really struggle to get the angles right in my mind of someone swinging a mallet quickly and one time hitting a shin and the next aimed for the head so maybe I'm missing something.
There are other senses involved as well even though it isn't visual, including things like spatial reasoning or maybe even something like proprioception - like I said it's hard to explain.
I can imagine myself in this position better than I can "visualize" it happening to someone else.
Interestingly enough, I have very lucid dreams and have realized that I am able to visualize (with color!) inside of them. I can't imagine being able to do that at will while awake, must be amazing.
For example, I had never considered that there would be different processes involved with imagining something visual vs recalling it but now that seems super obvious to me! I love when something tweaks my perspective and suddenly a new world of possibilities is revealed.
You can have passive experiences via either medium. TikTok is really optimized for that shallow level of engagement though and books trend in the opposite direction.
If you fall asleep with a book, you wake up on the same page. Advancement through the text is user-driven, not media-driven.
Instagram reels leave you with nothing. Once the next reel passes, the previous one is flushed down the memory, as if these last 28 seconds were nothingness.
While the humble reel only demands a vague trance-like state and your eyes turned to the phone, the books needs your full attention and mental capacity to be enjoyed completely.
Note that none of this is specific to books. Shows, movies, (solo) games. They're all about something. The point of instagram reel is being about nothing at all. Watching it to fill your head with void. A silent, temporary death. "Psychological obliteration" is particularly apt here.
The family exodus, the nuclear family, the society of purchasers probably didn’t helped that much either.
Cervantes, 1605:
>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...
Now we're all Men of La Mancha.
“There,” “here,” psychological obliteration—what is this but sciency reasoning, on par with boomers claiming, “Games make kids violent”?
“Your entire whole self is destroyed.” Jeez.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
When I am home I really struggle to put things into practice because the easiest thing to do when I wake up is to look at my phone before I sit at my computer.
I do a lot of meaningful work on the computer, but I’m uneasy about how frictionless it is to just be on the computer and never act in the real world.
Asking for a friend...
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
https://www.solent.ac.uk/blogs/media-technology-blogs/digita...
Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper.
[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch
Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.
Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
However, it's not hard to compensate for this with digital books, through bookmarking options, copy-pasting specific parts and storing them elsewhere (with tiny notes on page number and book title) and other options.
I keep all of my own digital books DRM-stripped in my own device folders and back those up too. This to at least partly replicate the possession security that physical books give. I also absolutely never trust storing large collections of them on something as absurdly untrustworthy as, for example, "Kindle on Demand", which is on-demand right until your access demand arbitrarily gets ignored no matter how much money you spent on what were supposedly owned purchases.
But that's just me being stuck in my ways. So and I see the use of digital versions as well. Specially as a lot of my technical books now often coming with a digital copy! It's best of both worlds.
But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can read offline to keep someone over the network from tampering with contents. You can advocate for and obtain DRM-free experiences so tampering is easier to spot. You can make many copies of the bits for yourself, leaning into one of software's great strengths. So I think there are many ways to resist the "neon god" here. But we do each of us have to think for ourselves about the consequences of our choices.
I can do that, too, and sometimes I am better at it. Given that, I prefer reader-side filtering over writer-side filtering.
It's arguably especially wild that Desmurget doesn't get a mention in these discussions. Or, I mean, it would be wild in a world where there was a smooth and effortless flow of good ideas and arguments between people, maybe over some sort of transcontinental network...
A lot of the topics that people have opinions about when it comes to screens and devices and health and etc have loads of studies on them. Which doesn't mean that everything is all solved, there are unexplored and uncertain areas, but reading these discussions you'd think there was no data out there whatsoever. There's tons!
It doesn't mean either that people can't enjoy sharing opinions, some of the anecdotes are interesting and insightful, but there seems to be a few obvious arguments which are basically non-arguments that get trotted out, and which seem to be hindering a more fruitful discussion.
How many times have we seen someone make a point about the bad type of screen-use for someone to say: "yeah, but I use ________ like _________." or "yeah, but when you read books you're being antisocial as well." and so on. The research on the topic distinguishes carefully between the different types of use! Etc etc, I could go on.
This comment is intended constructively
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair - for the curious.
The Sokal affair is a funny thing yes, which I'd seen before (and I presume many people here are familiar with). I don't see how it's relevant here?
I mean - it was one journal, in 1996, that had no peer review process, that published a fake article someone sent in to prove a point that the journal publishes at least some crap...
What should we reject based on that in your opinion - all cultural and media studies presumably, at the very least, you seem to be clearly suggesting. And every philosopher too? The logicians? The linguists? All of social science? Economics too? Is it just STEM-type stuff that's acceptable then?
Seems preposterous to me. The soft sciences are looser, and definitely have a higher proportion of hand-wavy nonsense, but rejecting it all to avoid stuff you don't like is just silly. Learning to avoid the crap and find the good stuff is pretty similar to other fields.
And often, anecdotally, it seems to me that the more interesting figures in the experimental sciences tend to be very intrigued by the softer, arguably sometimes "trickier" questions that the non-STEM sciences can explore.
Then I am not interested in their idea on tech.
If some politicians and engineers wanted to lay train tracks down straight through the middle of a town, would the locals have a say in the matter, in your opinion? Or should they leave those decisions to the experts?
I do imagine you're not really serious though. To illustrate that - let's imagine for the sake of argument that Julian Assange (or Richard Stallman, or Kent Pitman, or whoever whose political opinions you might dislike) would code rings around you.
Would you suddenly take their opinion seriously? You wouldn't, if you didn't like them or their opinions. You'd come up with some other ad hoc reason why they could (and must!) be totally ignored. I mean, please correct me if I'm wrong here.
So why maintain the pretense that you're rejecting these people because they're not a part of the coding tribe, of which you're such a proud member and staunch representative?
In short: Talk is cheap, I want to see that they have also done the legwork. That the issues is based on actual facts, and that it comes from a genuine desire to know and solve a problem.
My only reprieve is that sci-fi short story omnibuses contain maybe 20-30% true sci-fi that's exactly what I'm searching for. But buying a print novel off the shelf got to the point where it was wasting my money. And I can only re-read the classics so much.
Waiting for the "sci-fi was always current-day allegory!" sophomorists to flood the comments.
But cyberpunk is not imaginative in the way you're looking for. I can appreciate that.
What are some examples of the old-school, non-allegorical stuff? Maybe Exhalation?
The article reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes 'Academia here I come' (Reddit reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...)
