The death of reading is threatening the soul

(washingtonpost.com)

38 points | by tamersalama 2439 days ago

17 comments

  • illegal_in_ca 2439 days ago
    The death of reading is threatening the soul

    The death of thinking is threatening the soul.

    • Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. • Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. • Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day. • Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day. • Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.

    Yup. He didn't get those factoids from reading books. Mayhaps he received these gems of wisdom from:

    When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.

    I have 20,000 books to the author's 5,000. I'm not kidding. SQL database provided on demand. # books don't matter so much, it's what you do with them.

    Reading is a proxy for thinking. Reading is only useful for those eureka moments (now called "a-ha moments" -- I guess it's shorter?) and for information gain. A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction -- an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can also provide that eureka moment.

    Stop reading, start learning. The best education is observation and participation. I'm all for books, but if they ain't teaching us about how to solve our own problems, then fuck them books. Get the knowledge, get the power. But be conscious, be aware, pay attention, did you miss it? You missed it. That's okay, I did when I wrote it, but if you hash the previous paragraph (algorithm you'll have to figure out), you'll get 2 bitcoins. I hear they might still be worth something. I read that in a book.

    • hodgesrm 2439 days ago
      Reading is not just a proxy for thinking. It's the gateway to a world of knowledge. Macchiavelli described this beautifully in a letter to Francesco Vettori in 1513 from exile in the Tuscan countryside. [1] It's the best description I have ever read of the life of the mind.

      Here's the money paragraph in full.

      When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, discussing the definition of a princedom, the categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost. And if ever any whimsy of mine has given you pleasure, this one should not displease you. It ought to be welcomed by a prince, and especially by a new prince; therefore I am dedicating it to His Magnificence Giuliano. Filippo da Casavecchia has seen it. He will be able to give you some account of both the work itself and the discussions I have had with him about it, although I am continually fattening and currying it.

      [1] http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-lett-ve...

      • illegal_in_ca 2439 days ago
        Yup, that's how you read a book.

        I would, however, cut the the paragraph as follows. Everything after is just an adversisement for the authors blog.

        When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study..."

        • jrimbault 2439 days ago
          > just an advertisement for the author's blog

          Well... It's one of the many "blogs" worth reading. And a very old one. (sidenote: I'm really not sure you can even call it a "log" of any kind)

          • illegal_in_ca 2439 days ago
            Hey thanks for correctly my typo when you quoted my.
    • madaxe_again 2439 days ago
      You're missing one big element of what books can teach far more readily than a tweet, or an instagram, which you seem to think are the equivalent - empathy.

      Only through the act of imagining a narrator or character's emotional state can you enjoy a book, and doing so brings one to identify with or at the very least understand better the circumstances that individual faces.

      Yes you can do this face to face, or by living a life that might be represented in a novel, but literature is a far more efficient way to broaden experience.

      Books are not purely about learning facts, figures, dates and fates.

      • chiefalchemist 2439 days ago
        Imagination. That's key. Exercising your imagination is important. And, it seems, getting to less and less important to more and more people.

        We will never become what we cannot imagine.

      • runamok 2438 days ago
        Interesting idea. I wonder if there is any correlation to the number and types of books you have read and at what age. Would consumption of other story telling mediums such as movies, tv, video games, etc. be similar? I would guess books allow you to better put yourself in the protagonist's shoes since they exist more in your imagination than more concrete examples with a canonical author...
      • philippoi 2439 days ago
        "Only through the act of imagining..."

        Be careful with the only. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books while neglecting sympathy for the characters and their experience; looking at the interplay of ideas and theories, for example.

        Sometimes I think it's been due to my lack of context. For instance, I love the little Dostoyevsky I've read, but I'm always perplexed by the social world of his characters. Maybe they're high bourgeois and clashing with the strain on that order in the Russia of his day. Still, I thoroughly enjoy the other elements of his writing that come to life. I was surprised to find the most thrilling so far was the first half of Notes From Underground. It reads like sci-fi to me: all of the talk about everything being calculated and determined in advance.

        • madaxe_again 2439 days ago
          Then you haven't read enough Dostoevsky :)

          I think he's one of the most empathetically evocative authors there was - by the end of crime and punishment if you can't identify with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, you've assuredly missed a beat.

          That said, context is all - and it's helpful to also read his contemporaries, understand Russian history of the time on a broader scale (this too one can acquire from books), and then follow through on the trajectory of thought and feeling with the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov, before landing at the post-glasnost world with Pelevin and Kurkov.

      • yumaikas 2439 days ago
        I'm not sure that books readily teach empathy, however. The can expand you exposure to things that others have to go through, but empathy requires caring about other people to begin with, and few books will teach that on their own.
        • icebraining 2439 days ago
          Books don't give you just what others go through, but also what others think - their state of mind. If you prick us, do we not bleed? only works for psychological "pricks" if you can imagine the person psychologically bleeding, and books can let you experience that.
        • philippoi 2439 days ago
          There's a popular study result that says it does: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377
    • chiefalchemist 2439 days ago
      Reading and resulting thought are exercise for the brain. Some days you do a triathlon. Some just a stroll around the block. But both are better than mindlessly sitting on the sofa watching TV. Most TV is not exercise.

      With that said, the mind is like other muscles. It has a limited capacity. That is, it also needs recovery. Reading "Your Brain at Work" was a seminal moment for me.

      Finally, reading, observing (as mentioned above) and watching (i.e., TV or mobile device) seem to be three different things. They each engage the mind (and thought process differently). Based on my experience, there is a difference in people who read the news, and those who watch it. Reading, to me, is active. Watching is passive. How you think (about the news, for example) effects what you think. Or so it seems.

    • rimliu 2439 days ago

        > A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog 
        >  -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction --
        > an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can
        > also provide that eureka moment.
      
      Eureka moments are when the new bridge has been built in your brain. Reading is one (and one of the most potent) of the things what creates columns on which this bridge lays.
    • jansho 2439 days ago
      > When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length

      The Atlantic is usually interesting for me, but this was a major problem before. The way to combat it is to read it anyway. With lots of practice, you'll train yourself to be more focused and ignore that conscious awareness of 'ticking time'.

      Edit: language

    • wideem 2438 days ago
      Reading is not a proxy for thinking. When you read a book about something you can get information which took the author of the book 10 or even more times to write. You cannot simply mindlessly read the book without thinking therefore you learn when you read
    • cconcepts 2439 days ago
      Upvote for holding my attention for 5+ paragraphs
    • cobbzilla 2439 days ago
      nice dead prez reference
      • illegal_in_ca 2439 days ago
        My HN reading bot gives an 84% chance that your response was not written by a bot.

        * Dictated, not read.

        • illegal_in_ca 2439 days ago
          There are several things happening here. I make a reference to a (rather famous?) book by Dale Carnegie, called How to win friends an influence people (that's the part after the asterisk).

          I personally have no doubt that the above response was not written by bot. At this current moment in history -- mind this was written on 2017-07-25 (ISO, EDT, YMMV, HHGTTG, etc.) -- bot technology had not yet progressed to the stage that all HN comments were being persused by bots that knew that dead prez was written in lowercase, not uppercase.

          I'd like to thank my bot for calling this to my attention so that I could answer personally. He only deploys on special occasions -- I doubt that any more than 0.4% of HN comments have been made by him.

          <random quote> For we are the future, and we are the past. We are not the present -- this is not a gift. </random quote>

  • openclosed 2439 days ago
    Is the utter lack of originality in this article further cause of this so-called "death of reading"?

    The whole thing reads like a dressed-up humble-brag of how many books the writer has (5,000).

    • jrimbault 2439 days ago
      Is 5000 books very many ? I can't tell how many books I've read since I was 6 and read Lotr, it might be in the thousands I guess ?

      But what is "many books" ? Some books are 30 pages long and life time deep.

  • Fifer82 2439 days ago
    I listen to Audiobooks on a daily basis, in the shower, if I am doing a task alone (fixing stuff, cleaning etc), and always half an hour or so before bed.

    Everyone is different but if you enjoy reading, yet feel you don't have time, or want to strain your eyes after a day of screen staring, I would recommend trying it.

    • icebraining 2439 days ago
      I like audiobooks, but I'm constantly giving up on them due to the narrators, alas. I can't focus if they're too monotonic, but the interpretations are often underwhelming. I've just started listening to Player Piano (read by Christian Rummel), and while the narration isn't terrible, it's still not good enough not to be distracting in certain scenes.
    • calebm 2438 days ago
      Seconded. I love audiobooks! It feels like a serious life hack - being able to read books while driving or doing yard work is like doubling my time during those overlaps.
  • rwnspace 2439 days ago
    As far as I'm aware, average book sales per capita have never been higher. The headline of this article is a wonderful example of how news outlets are scare-mongering for clicks. People are reading more, actually, and even those not buying books are reading thousands more words per day on their smartphones than they would ever have before. Sure, it's not high literature, but that's a majority of human communication. Newspaper sales have declined, but news readership among young people has massively expanded.

    I'm also quite dubious of the attention-span theory. It doesn't seem to have much science behind it, only cultural momentum. The most interesting study I read recently was how the proximity of smartphones can diminish cognitive abilities. But that, to me, is a question of notifications and social functions. [Edit: I just saw The Shallows below, I'll look into it]

    We are more interconnected than ever. We can instantly find stimulating discussion on an incredible depth of topics. We read more than ever. What we are experiencing, in my reading, is a measurement/phenomena bias. Now we can find out what the [Jones' next door] think of what's on the news, which disappoints us, rather than allowing ourselves to consider it private and so never give it a second thought. It's not necessarily that the world, or humans, have changed in some ground-breaking, global-depression-explaining manner - simply that the doors to our opinions and habits are more open than before.

    Perhaps this does indeed have some effect, in a more permanent sense. But I regard this more as a function of the tendency for people to out-source beliefs. It only takes an hour or two to find the worst of all humanity, and the best. The drafty corridors between people these days carry beliefs across the degrees of separation faster than ever before. My pet theory is it's the beliefs about ones capabilities or 'type-destinies' which hurt the emotive liberals for supporting liberal democracies. It's the cultural-state beliefs that hurt the 'realpolitik' conservatives in gripping the real politics. On both accounts, I do think this can be resisted, but it takes time and psychological space that we have replaced for 'productive' work in mostly zero-sum economic activities.

    When it comes to fashionable (and effective) practices like CBT and meditation, I like to ask whether they are assistive for the human condition generally, or just our present condition. Marrying an internalised locus of control with an ebb-and-flow outlook on life could be the healing function. Or perhaps we simply need to arrest our sense of personal identity, and alight the cultural train every so often.

  • z3t4 2439 days ago
    If you have kids, make sure you read with them. Reading comprehending is going down, and we need to stop it, or there will be a whole generation where TLDR > 256 chars.
    • illegal_in_ca 2439 days ago
      Very clever. Your response is only 168 characters. If you were trying to fit it in a tweet, however, you'd have to make it only this long :)
  • gnicholas 2439 days ago
    Kind of ironic that this article about online distractions has auto-playing video advertisements. Not just one, either. Even after you pause the first one, if you keep scrolling you hit another instance of the same video ad.
  • atemerev 2439 days ago
    Well, I have now no physical books at home (used to have a nice library, but moving through 6 countries and 30+ living places in the last 10 years pretty much excludes the possibility).

    But my Goodreads account is still alive and kicking, and my Kindle account is full of crispy new releases which I do read. Books are the world.

  • tamersalama 2439 days ago
  • sohkamyung 2439 days ago
    I usually save on-line articles to Pocket and read them in Reading mode (a Reading mode also available in browsers).

    That cuts out a lot of the distracting ads and links.

  • martinmusio7 2439 days ago
    Luckily, there is a reading mode in most browsers...
  • zmix 2439 days ago
    How can/could Elon Musk read two books a day?
    • arkh 2439 days ago
      Lot of technical books are short. 150ish pages.

      And the more you read the faster you get: you don't decipher every word. You notice a standard structure and get the meaning. That's why reading things written by a foreigner can be slower.

      And honestly after some time you learn to not read useless paragraphs: read the first, read the last, if it is mainly the same thing you can forget about what's in-between. The worst offender is LotR: song? Pass; character description? Pass 5 pages.

    • a_imho 2439 days ago
      Reading 2 average length books a day is certainly feasible and doing that for years paints the picture of a exceptionally committed reader.

      While I don't know much about Elon Musk's reading habits, outlandish sounding unfalsifiable claims are sometimes just that.

    • zer0tonin 2439 days ago
      Turning the pages of two books a day isn't hard.
  • DrScump 2439 days ago
    WP missed the irony that they paywall their own site, which inhibits reading of their content, anyway.
  • mto 2439 days ago
    tl;dr
  • SubiculumCode 2439 days ago
    TL;DR is the generation

    I skim pretty often too. There are several reasons. One, a little of what the author was contending; it is harder to hold attention. But there is more to it. Most media is not worth my full attention. I used to love fiction. But most plots are old, and few scenarios are new to me anymore. News articles tend to be 1 paragraph of new information, then blah blah blah a recapitulation of everything I already knew. When I read science as part of my job, I read it in two ways. One I scan vast numbers of abstracts. This gives me a sense of the lay of the land. Then I do a deep dive of reviews. Then I read critical papers, with a pen, every sentence carefully, building ideas, bridging concepts, and also, evaluating the method. Can you imagine doing that with a report from cnn? Why?

    • chiefalchemist 2439 days ago
      I agree. When I stand outside myself, I find that 95% of what my senses consume is noise and/or unimportant. Some of that is unavailable. What matters is your ability to stay on the front foot of being mindful, and reduce noise as much as possible.

      It's not easy.

  • ggm 2439 days ago
    I had visions of the flatfish. I only clicked to find out how reading affects flatfish populations. I am very disappointed this is not about fish. Fish need souls too.
  • mrkrabo 2439 days ago
    >The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around.

    I can certainly relate. What's the solution?

    • prostoalex 2439 days ago
      The Shallows http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16 is a pretty good read on the subject - there are neurological effects related to over-development of frontal core (responsible for quick decision-making, but also anxiety and depression) at the expense of hippocampus (responsible for concentration).

      In a nutshell, the solutions involve mindfulness, making deliberate choices in regards to checking e-mails, Instagram, etc., meditation or just concentration practice, exercising the hippocampus by reading longer books.

    • digi_owl 2439 days ago
      I fine myself wondering if the problem is not so much the source, but the presentation.

      I played around with a Firefox extension that would paginate(?) an article for me, and found I could then much better tolerate reading long ones where I before would jump ahead for "the meat".

      But I also find that way too many "technical" articles these days try to turn what is being written about into a "social" piece. This by adding a whole bunch of back story on the people involved, and many even back story on their parents and grandparents...

    • allemagne 2439 days ago
      If you're asking for yourself, then you could just frequently force yourself to read for longer periods of time. I found that this retrained my distraction-prone brain pretty quickly.

      As for people in general who largely would never force themselves to do anything on their own I doubt there's a quick solution that isn't based on shame and social pressure.

    • chadcmulligan 2439 days ago
      I find my attention span
    • atemerev 2439 days ago
      Look around, think, and read the next paragraph or two. Not a big deal, if you still finish the damn book.
    • loblollyboy 2439 days ago
      Move to Alaska and get eaten by a bear
    • ktRolster 2439 days ago
      Take the bus to the library and sit there. Leave your phone at home.
  • cft 2439 days ago
    Sole is a fish. You meant soul in the title