Doomscrolling ourselves to death(edwest.co.uk) |
Doomscrolling ourselves to death(edwest.co.uk) |
And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book.
And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so.
The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.
No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.
He essentially advocates for a society that has the attributes that he accuses oral culture of: conservative, repetitive, static, lacking innovation.
- Jefferson letter to John Adams, 1812.
I figure in ten years when someone asks what "doomscrolling" means, we'll probably just shrug and say it means scrolling away to our doom.
> One particularly desperate ... strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture
So over privileged people buy $1500 iphones, only to kick them across room, to hide? I do not think reading yet another master piece would help such person!
The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.
The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.
Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
Maybe you have only been reading the wrong books.
30 years ago, that was the only option to read from. So people did it. Now people are not at mercy of these intellectual longform masturbators.
All would be well with the World if this was actually true…
https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260627_IRC330/2026...
>Many of [students] do very well—but a striking share perform abysmally (see chart 1). Across rich countries some 8% of students in tertiary education notch up a score in literacy no better than one might expect from a ten-year-old child. The share is about the same for numeracy. Worse, the share at or below this bar has risen since the tests were last run, a little over a decade ago. The share of very poor performers in literacy has more than doubled.
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/06/25/students-...
There is plenty of evidence in the article from real professors at real universities (ex: Princeton), saying that they’ve had to dramatically cut reading workloads from humanities courses. I’ve heard similar things from European universities.
Other hard evidence is in plummeting reading comprehension scores in many countries that participate in PISA.
In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.
And all you have to contribute is that this is “idiotic”? The irony. Inform yourself.
Second, yes, and mostly because I did actually read those stats and details of how they are made. All the nuance from the actual scientific article gets exaggerated into completely different claims just to create outrage and perpetuate it again and again. Usually by people who do not know what PISA or reading grades measure.
Reading comprehension as measured by PISA have zero to do with long form reading of books including classics. It is not trained by reading those nor measure reading those. The short for articles full of graphs, scientific claims and such the Atlantic complains about is how you train people for PISA. I am not criticizing PISA here btw. It is ok to measure that.
> In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.
Interestingly, those who made this claim usually do not know how reading grades are measured or even how high they go. "The worse in generations" claim is especially dubious and tend to based on comparison between "guess performance of imaginary past elite student in undefined historical period" with low performing student today. Low performing students 3-4 generations ago disappear, because we imagine them to not exist.
There is outrage every time a school replaces one book by another. Or when a course that has no reason to assign full Odyssey assigns range of materials with one chapter from it. There is outrage when student names a contemporary book as the favorite one instead of a classic.
Your argument here, funnily enough, is an example of the exact kind of literacy decline as stated in the OP article.
> Allusions are gone; metaphor is treated literally, often provoking dim-witted outrage.
No, professors are not claiming that college students are literally incapable of sounding out words.
They are saying that students are not able to keep attention on large bodies of text, to follow arguments, understand authorial intent, describe themes, identify rhetorical techniques, or intuit metaphors (such as this very use of reading as synecdoche/metaphor for this whole class of literacy skills which is so obvious that it feels absurd to even have to explain it)
An 8-year-old may be able to read as proven by their ability to answer basic plot questions about a Magic Treehouse book, that doesn't mean they are able to read for the purposes of a university course of any type.
And no, we do not need to guess at literacy performance of people of the past, we have the curricula, we have the books, we have the essays and exams. There is no "guessing at the performance of imaginary elites from the past", we can use the same texts and the same tests. That's one of the neat things about reading, you don't have to guess what happened in the past, you can just read it.
Is he not aware that Mr. Jobs has been dead for over a decade?
There were really two components to it I valued - the inherent interest in the topic itself of course, but also the sense of community and recognition you got as you dove deeper and created cooler things to share with people. At some point the second overtook the first, and I internally started to value the outcome or reaction to something I would create more than the satisfying pursuit of making itself. Doing a thing wasn't valuable unless it would be acknowledged by some group of people. It's been a long process trying to get rid of that mindset and I'm still not done, and has caused a lot of anxiety and questioning my interest in the hobbies I love.
A lot of the questioning has been driven by the absolute saturation of my online feeds. The algorithm can so quickly figure out the type of stuff I like and show me so much of it that it begins to start feeling meaningless in 10 minutes of scrolling - deconstructing that value system in real time (and I guess technically helping? hooray for accelerationism). If there is so much out there, what am I supposed to create that could add to the pile in a meaningful way? It really takes a lot of effort to sever yourself from the algorithmic mindset and remind yourself that you got into it because you like doing the thing.
Not to mention the second order effects, like the ancillary feelings of guilt that show up because I start questioning why I want to avoid seeing things about topics I supposedly enjoy. Part of it is personal flaw - I find it difficult to see something cool without feeling some imperative to figure out how I could do it myself. When I don't want to feel bothered, I'm driven towards more mindless consumption that doesn't run the risk of reminding me that I should be doing something. I feel I would be much happier engaging in the hobbies I have if I was a bit less aware of everything related to them going on in every part of the world, and the algorithm is a big culprit in that. Detaching from it is not just hard because "phone feels good", but also because it means completely giving up on the value system I grew up on, where you could know if you were doing something meaningful if it got attention from other people in the communities you wanted to be a part of. "Attention" has been too commoditized at this point to use it as a fulfilling indicator of return (but unfortunately, some people have to play this game if they want to support a living off a creative endeavor - at least I can ignore that part because I just make music or do creative coding as a hobby).
I recognise that it’s easier to establish these habits early. Our children are still toddlers, so we haven’t yet faced the challenges of parenting teenagers, but they rarely have access to screens because we deliberately restrict it. Even Steve Jobs limited his children’s use of technology at home. Recognising the problem ought to lead to setting and enforcing limits, not treating our children’s access to these devices as inevitable.
I've basically given up on humanity. YouTube is a cesspit of stupidity - a race to the bottom and right through the other side of how utterly devoid of dignity human beings can be. I feel a physical rage at the mere sight of all the thumbnails of people pulling the stupidest face they can to try to get the stupidest people on the planet to click on their stupid video.
For every MrBeast there's a 3Blue1Brown. For every recycled clip from a well-known TV series uploaded purely to drive ad revenue for a bot-controlled channel there's a fine art restoration video showing a very niche process with a real, skilled human behind it.
And so on.
The average seems to be shifting rapidly towards slop though
Even with a curated subscription feed it’s getting pretty rough
What is happening, however, is that people are getting increasingly acclimated to consuming easily-digestible content because our lives are ruled by a couple of companies who make money off of your attention and the human brain struggles to sustain focus through friction, even though the way we actually learn and question our lives is through that difficulty. Unfortunately, social media isn't the only culprit because almost all media that gets sold suffers from forced participation in the attention economy, although social media is probably one of the worst culprits just because the form factor makes it so easy to consume brain-rotting content.
I guess all that to say, I think the problem is fundamentally structural and thus essentially bound to happen because of the way our society and economy is organized, so I'm not sure what there is to do about this. Maybe we can all collectively decide to power through the lack of dopamine and actively choose content that is more difficult but also more edifying to force the algorithms to optimize for something more substantive.
What I have noticed is that doomscrolling is like MSG. It's a great hit on the appetite, but it doesn't last. Maybe all sugar hits are like that. Unlike MSG, it will I think continue to be a root cause negative on attention span. MSG is just very rapid "yummy" and all the negative flak was like the yellow rain of bee shit, not actually chemical warfare as we were told by the doom scroll of the day: TV news.
No doubt that effect is real. But I think of it as this: some activities excercise your brain in ways that improve it, make new connections between neurons etc. While other activivities don't. Or worse: degrade your brain. Aaand: which is which, also depends on what you've done before. Or how often you do it. Or in what environment.
People who read books all day, every day, may become walking libraries who know all their classics. Are they smarter? Have more 'agile' brains? I doubt it. Perhaps the brain specializes on that activity & becomes veeery good at it. Potentially becoming worse at other activities. Granted: there's probably a lot of 'unused' capacity in most people's brains such that improving one area doesn't come at the cost of other abilities.
But I do suspect there's the rub: a healthy brain must be excercised regularly. Not just by doing again & again something it's already good at (however challenging). But also by trying new stuff. Activities not done before. Explore new subjects in entirely different fields. Especially stuff that promotes imagination / creativity as opposed to more passive consumption like movies or music. Couch potato? Move your muscles!
I'm not sure whether there's a way to max out that brain excercise part (if healty, and assuming it's possible in the 1st place). But chances are reading would be part of it. Longreads & a broad range of fiction in particular. Some puzzle or exploration / building type games could be. Mechanical construction stuff a la Lego surely is. As well as a variety of sports (doing, that is! Not watching or discussing). Socializing in various ways: in moderation.
As for people choosing (?) to spend a big chunk of their lives on passive consumption (great Dutch wording: "je leven wegflixen"): let 'em. If post-scarcity, information-overloaded society moves the masses' lives there, so be it.
Personally I prefer a hike up a mountain, improving a hands-on creative skill, a thoughful discussion, or a deep dive into an interesting new subject.
It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
That’ll teach them.
Jokes aside, reading something doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I think people read more than ever. Subtitles, captions, social media posts, source code. Most of it is jank.
> people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture
Reads like unsourced depressionwave slop. First source that comes to mind: https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocu...
Assuming memory capacity would yield the best decisions and best leadership ignores charisma, personal life experience, sociopathy, interdependence, society, uncertainty about the future and more.
You can’t be too literate and educated: it’s a rat race / status race like any other.
Even if the classics and history siphon into modern productions such as Hades.
> The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.
Cultural accessibility is at an all time high. Next to oceans of entertaining things more optimized for consumption it’s hard to stay relevant.
Expertise and being able to rely on others with expertise is more valuable than requiring every leader to have read the classics or being part of some intellectual elite. Knowing things is awesome mainly because it’s fast and helps with survival.
Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.
Edit: wrong any/every
You are correct and yet it's a straw man. At no point did the author advocate for everyone knowing everything.
He IS advocating that everyone know something. A position that is increasingly, comically, tragically untrue.
maybe the elites like the journalists e.g author above - who wanna control thought & media - in a roundabout way unleashed a beast they can't control - social media - which turns people into passive consumers. now the people can't be controlled at all - massive apathy due to social media. Trump 2016, Brexit etc was the result.
Maybe someone whose only method of selecting books is to scroll through Kindle and look at the titles, maybe they need to pay attention to publication dates. But the rest of the world picks books because they get a recommendation, they look at reviews, they know the author, etc.
NYTimes said that the new Marlon James book might be the book of the century so far. Hyperbole, I'm sure, but it's now on my reading list and I'm pretty sure it wasn't written by AI.
Newness is not really a valuable quality when it comes to books, barring some exceptions like books on subjects that change frequently and meaningfully.
Diminished quality however is a meaningful signal, and would give most serious readers pause.
As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.
I cannot imagine this is an actual trend that's preventing people from reading, so please bring a couple citations.
Reading has been on the decline for more than a decade, far beyond when AI was invented. I'll go with the 2008 Steve Jobs quote:
> In January 2008, Steve Jobs famously claimed that "people don’t read anymore," specifically asserting that 40 percent of Americans read one book or less the previous year.
At his point I think that one has to assume that almost every author is using AI to some extent. And even if they don't, their editors will apply changes, no doubt using ChatGPT and other tools.
I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.
Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.
And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.
It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.
People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized.
I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible.
There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind
YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad.
Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses.
I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.
I wish I was in a financial position where I didn't have to bother about this.
I've been limiting my use of social media (aside Reddit and HN) for almost two weeks now and I've been reading books and doing other things with my time rather than consuming content that isn't beneficial to me.
Check out the Wikipedia article - The Shallows
"""
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book claims research shows "online reading" yields lower comprehension than reading a printed page. The Shallows was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
"""
I've had the thought that if I were to start a business, social media manager (or a comparable outsourced gig) would be one of my first hires.
Like I'd far rather deal with tax minutia and skip on hiring an accountant in favour of being able to outsource social media use.
People will consume thousands of hours of that stuff and not be able to solve one physics problem. Endless exercise and fitness science videos and still be out of shape. Watch language learning content and never speak another language. Endless programming tutorials without ever being able to program.
As the author of the article points out, Neil Postman correctly observed that the Sesame Street didn't teach people anything but how to watch television. People watch "education YouTube" but don't get a tangible education, they learn how to watch YouTube.
So we were pretty much a nation of coke heads. It's probably much more difficult to see the harm in things when its so normalized. But of course people did and so the tide gradually shifted against it. We're already seeing the exact same process play out with social media and, more generally, digital addictions. But it's a relatively unprecedented technology in that it's essentially a digital drug that can't be especially well defined. But I expect these things are well on there way out. The age restrictions will likely come with broader prohibitions if they are positive outcomes from such, and we're already seeing exactly that in places like Australia.
Government and intelligence agencies desire to use it for mind control or whatever will probably quickly fade once they realize the same concept (which I think is quite frankly absurd - hence my sardonic term) could just as well be used against them, were it possible.
That's a common misleading myth.
Early coca cola was coca leaves and kola nut. Yes, the former contained cocaine alkaloids. But it's different from saying you take a soda and mix it with cocaine. The dosage wasn't comparable to a snorted line today.
And we're doing it right now with alcohol.
Anxiety gone.
I was only having 2-3 filter cups a day, probably less mg than a single large energy drink but that was enough.
I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulation, but some clinical regulation like making "Explore" tabs or feeds irrelevant to your social networks, opt-in by default would have such a Pareto improvement to all our brains.
Instead we are getting endless whinging over water usage in data centers ironically flooding our algorithmic feeds.
During the marijuana prohibition days the resounding chorus in the discourse was that marijuana was not physically addictive like other drugs, and therefore we must treat it differently. There were problems with that argument if you got into the details, but it did establish the idea that not all drugs are equally harmful and therefore treating them all equally was not logical.
It’s funny now to see these equivalencies where we’re supposed to believe that social media is no different than extremely powerful drugs that have severe withdrawal syndromes and wreak havoc on their user’s bodies. The equivalence is obviously false to anyone who has been in the sad position of knowing an opioid addict.
It’s possible to make arguments about social media that don’t depend on obviously false equivalence to powerful drugs.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6069268
Or listen to just a few minutes of Patrick Boyle talking about them.
https://youtu.be/IUMUJgjDvU0?list=TLPQMDYwOTIwMjbX3y5H-uRecw...
I guess it works like putting bitterant in cans of compressed air to stop people from huffing them.
It started as you expect, with more and more bot accounts pretending to be real people to either act as sleeper agents for future causes or to actively promote politics and products, except they're now interactive so you're tricked into engaging with them.
But the tipping point for me was when real people started using AI to write their posts and comments for them. And I'm not just talking about randos but about real people you follow who have written tech books and such. I've seen a few of them admit to this when confronted and they use the same excuse, that these are their thoughts and they stand by them, they're just improved by AI.
And I'm not just talking about long posts or comments. You see it with one liner responses which leads me to think that their reddit experience has now been automated and that at the most they hit approve on a queue.
So I've become cynical, almost in a state of solipsism, about every post and comment that I see, assuming everything is AI by default until I've checked which is now almost impossible with the private history. And at that point being on reddit is just like chatting with an LLM but with extra deception, so why even try.
Things were a lot better for the brain when information wasn't coming in as an unending stream that even sometimes responds to what you have to say.
Just last week, Youtube took even more steps in hiding your subscriptions homepage on iOS, and on desktop the shorts (content made for phones in portrait mode) is front and centre.
At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too.
But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is part of the problem, so I went back.
I have read it fully now and noticed two things. First, it's a very lengthy way to say few things. The author could surely have made the point much more crisp. But second, it's not just about the personal situation and some abstract form of person in society. It's also about those "in charge". And that's frightening.
There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me.
I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities.
We have a big problem.
What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various information feeds with blog posts, news articles, and projects relevant to my interests and the moment. I've come to prefer a more raw exposition of other people's thoughts. It seems partly in the interest of credibility; more spontaneous writing offers a richer surface area to judge the quality of thought. And finding it in a place where other people are free to critique and engage with those thoughts means that I'm not locked into just one voice. I also have the opportunity to engage myself which fundamentally changes how actively I think about it.
I'm open to the idea that the shift has come at a cost. There is value to reading something that someone has put a lot of work into and in large quantities. But the days when I felt it was enough to just passively let information flow over me seem to be over; it is a luxury I can't afford.
Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had larger attention spans. There are still stupid people now.
“No one reads Shakespeare anymore” is probably true, but it’s just as sad that families talk at dinner less, kids spend less time outside, watercolors and paint brushes gifted by grandparents are tossed aside, and kids don’t ride bikes, go camping, explore the woods behind school, bake brownies (that aren’t viral recipes), and so on. Instead of measuring IQ in correlation to technology, you could probably measure VO2 Max.
I would be willing to bet that it turns out that the algorithmic feed, and especially TikTok, are specifically correlated to some of these deleterious things, and have outsized effects on kids, teens, and the neurodiverse. Not everyone possesses the self-control to put the phone away after a 15-minute scroll break the way grandpa would shut off the tv as soon as the 6 o’clock news was over, and the algorithm is designed to prevent that and ultimately probably wears down native willpower over time.
“Let’s ban TikTok” sounds stupid and reactionary, but what to do about it is a discussion we ought to be having.
quite a while now. And have had periods where I've done it almost religiously. It is addictive. And the effects linger a lot longer than the period of scrolling. There is a thing I generally believe about neural pathways. That the road we most travel is the one we'll keep going back too. And doom scrolling makes me walk down those paths. To the point that it impairs and guides my thinking even after I stop.
And I have stopped. I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. I will find myself walking those paths regardless. And then, after a time, I start seeking out the doom again because it's comforting in it's discomfort.
It's probably the worst moment in recent history for this. The constant barrage of information whether it comes from AI, climate disasters, politics or any of the other myriad things that are occurring right now. It feels impossible to break from that cycle. I'm trying.
I want to be present and live in the moment. But it's hard to feel powerless. And Doomscrolling, while it absolutely doesn't bring power, brings a comforting illusion of it. I am aware of it, so I am at least a little in control.
What a strange phrase! But so true.
The only thing I would have to say is that you must keep doing the little and noble things that will bring no renown. It's small, but we all add up at the end of every week.
There are a lot of good staff in format of short essay or in blog posts and even in videos. So, its a bit incorrect to say that reading is better than watching. Or that people was more intelligent due to reading.
Question here is not how, but what to consume.
But I think even consuming high quality/professional content, with deep research and etc etc, can be addictive and lead to problems described in this post.
I don't really know how to classify this problem, but maybe - "producing ideas by yourself" vs "consuming someone other ideas"?
With reading we consume ideas. But because reading is boring (rating by speed of receiving information), we also have lot of time to think, to produce new ideas.
And what with watching videos? especially short - you have almost no time to think about 15sec video content, because it already gone up and you need to forget it and see next...
So, reading and watching, doomscrolling is all about one, but on different stage.
And all this about competing two's: create it by yourself or listen it from someone other.
P.S. this is even make sense.. look: the more you do something, the more you skilled in this. And vice versa. So, when you stop thinking by yourself and start listening, your intelligence go down just because intelligence is about thinking, about analyzing and about your own sight, not someone other.
I've also added userscripts to remove shorts and recs from YouTube as well as uninstalling absolutely all social apps and only using web
Ironically 4chan /pol/ now has higher quality debates and more diverse opinions than Reddit, and a faster website that doesn't constantly push nag screens or hang rendering.
What I'm getting at is the internet is too common and we need to retreat to extremely niche and selective platforms with limited content that you can't just binge for 2 hours.
That's the most significant line in the article. That was the peak of union power, and unions routinely had meetings and votes which mattered. What organization do you belong to today where the members can fire the leadership by a vote? When did you last go to a meeting run under Roberts Rules of Order, as almost all union meetings are?
Who is "weaponizing" it against you, and how?
The doomscrolling algorithms are 100% weaponized against us to keep us scrolling endlessly.
Now force all of culture and the most basic forms of social interactions through this digitally mediated funnel. You get the worst aspects of pre-literate and literate civilizations.
I've had the same thought that the real problem isn't necessarily the existence of Reddit, YouTube, etc., but the moment when you open them almost automatically and suddenly realize you've spent far longer there than you intended.
I'm actually building an app specifically around that idea called *Attention*.
It doesn't block anything or hinder you — you're always in full control. Instead, it tries to help you become aware of what you're doing during those moments, so you get a chance to consciously decide whether you actually want to continue.
The app is currently in beta testing and completely free.
What I find interesting about this approach is that the goal isn't necessarily “use your phone less” or “never use social media again.” It's more about *stopping yourself from using it without consciously choosing to*.
I'm hoping that building that awareness can eventually help people develop healthier habits rather than simply relying on increasingly strong restrictions.
Some people came from houses that had books in them and others did not. Accessibility to books was important, you would just pick things off the parent's shelves out of curiosity, and learn what you liked.
Not everyone was culturally rich even if they were financially well-off, you could come from a poor background where the house had books, and reading whilst bored was a form of education not everyone had.
If you lived in the countryside and needed to walk miles to see a friend then you tended to read more than those that had friends next door. They had sports and general shenanigans to get up to, and would not be reading as much.
I don't see those moaning about kids today downloading The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the Gutenberg library to read it on open source recycled e-screen tablets, whilst eating their quinoa and jackfruit.
Leave those kids alone means protecting them from online nonsense but there is no going back to the 1970s or earlier when kids would spend hours immersed in a book purely for the pleasure of it.
I use Youtube for long-form video and only select videos, and XCancel/Nitter for specific feeds by certain people, which I read according to a predetermined schedule.
I'm trying to read more, but it is definitely a struggle when I used to consume books voraciously. I'm definitely getting better though - for instance, I finished this article, at least. Beats scrolling thru /r/funny or something. I'm trying my best to reclaim my brain.
One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Ukraine in 2020 was that even the political jokes that you see on television have real highbrow wit and humor, which assume a high degree of literacy to understand. Even talking to some kids who were 14 years old, I was surprised at how they had memorized poetry in multiple languages and could write beautifully in cursive. You don't find that anymore in the West.
Sure, kids over here doomscroll themselves on TikTok as well, but they are not illiterate.
Anecdotally, i live in a 3rd world, developing country, and the situation is not that better than the Western, "Ipad kid" becomes more popular than ever here. In the next few years, i believe we will encounter the same problem.
Somehow even though this adds a gigantic amount of burden to reading, it taps into a “productivity” seeking part of my brain that can then create a sense of focus and accomplishment after each book.
Since then reading has been a lot easier and I can usually get to 1 hour per day. Still really underwhelming but it’s way more than I managed to accomplish through sheer force of will in the past
I’ve recently also subscribed to a few in print magazines to address the desire for up to date recent information we get from social media.
HN is still hard to quit, the amount of useful information here is still high. digg.com summarizes X which I’ve found to be useful for not feeling like I am missing out on discussions there.
I didn't even do it on purpose, it was a force of habit. I programmed myself to interrupt myself with mindless distractions, not even diversions, distractions.
So yeah, I always carry a small notebook and a kindle (and a fanny pack) and I have no social media apps on my phone which is a start.
The point can be made very quickly yes, but the background and context provided is what made this a good read to me. Sometimes we need to marinate in a topic for it to enter into deeper layers of the brain.
It's a natural instinct for engineers, to think you should always convey information in the most efficient way possible, but it's actually not how real understanding tends to occur in the real world. You need a lot of noisy carrier signal and time and context etc.
The author would likely suggest that we used to read for the variety of expression in the language in addition to becoming informed.
But in fairness, I pretty much always read through a couple comment threads and usually do that until I've read through a few differing viewpoints before ever opening the article just to get my critical thinking juices closing a bit before diving. Also helps me decide more accurately than going by the title alone if the content is going to be of substantive interest to me before I invest the effort and time into it.
I'd probably estimate I actually visit about 15-20% percent of the linked content in the threads I open on HN. But I'd estimate that I probably fully read 80% of the content linked in those select threads that pique my interest so all in all I think it works out. I also don't do very much commenting compared to many on here so it doesn't really matter whether I actually read the source material in this context.
Leading to it is:
> A recent report issued by Britain’s most important cultural funding body, the Arts Council, warned against the use of “terms like excellence” which may promote “unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued”.’
Which I find despairing. Article ends with:
> The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.
So the point goes far beyond 'social media despair', it goes to say that the entire culture is regressing.
This is I think why most people on HN don't read the article. Also in part because the comments are simply more information dense, whether it is fully about the article or not.
And I haven't read the article. I'm here for the comments.
> Have you? Be honest.
I think most people here would simply be honest, you don't need to tell them to be honest.
But maybe it's my Dutch culture interplaying, but I genuinely find the "be honest" redundant and almost an insinuation that people would not be honest on HN, which would imply people tend to veer towards being deceitful? Really? On HN?
HN is not Reddit.
AI tell. I don't think you wrote this comment with AI, but you might want to tweak this writing style in the future.
Not the OP, but I refuse to tweak my writing style because of that.
I don't think anyone here would think that I'm AI (because English is my second language), but people have assumed that I post using AI when I write in my native language. I honestly couldn't care less. AI is mimicking me, so there is no escape in the long term.
I think you got this all upside down.
I think it is much worse with social media, the content is a lot more niche and the algorithms a lot more addictive.
It's not so much the weird stuff they say, I think that is fairly normal, especially the younger you go. It's the inability to do anything in person without talking constant phone breaks that I find most worrying.
So weird/eerie to go into an In-N-Out Burger or something, and see a table full of teenagers just sitting there silently scrolling their phones. Feels like we're in an episode of the Twilight Zone sometimes.
Not just teenagers, too. You'll see grown ass adults sitting there, technically together but totally absorbed into their phones.
I want a TikTok-era Bowling Along examining the impact modern single feed social media has had on group participation in the new generations...
It’s sad, but also unbearable to be in her presence. The way she screams at her parents is so embarrassing. I feel bad for her parents, but they also coddled her to death and continue to to this day.
So, just how outraged is she about Lindsay Clancy not having been acquitted?
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1192222-a-lot-of-fans-are-b...
We're both in our late 40s so we grew up before the Internet but then aged into it.
Our political views were very different and yet the lengthy conversation that we had was not just polite but also oddly relaxing. We found ourselves finding common ground and even persuading each other to grow our views on some topics.
When I left he told me that this was the nicest most interesting conversation he's had in a long time and I agreed.
And then I remembered having these conversations all the time when I was in my late teens and early to late 20s and that trying to have these conversations in the last decade was always futile so I stopped.
And then I remembered being ashamed of myself several times for being dysregulated and defensive and even volatile, guilty of what you describe and aware of it, not just online but also in person.
So yes I agree with you about what you're saying but sadly I don't know of a solution.
Where else would they get English listening and reading? They dont speak English in their local town.
>guy from a village in eastern europe
Same for me, except it's people who don't read books.
I think about that one a lot.
For most subjects, the deeper you go means you need to read more books if you are really learning something new.
Even arvix papers eventually lead me to a book I am not familiar with.
I’ve learned to appreciate lasting things and ideas.
A blog post can be a few hundred words or a hundred thousand. It can even be a series of blog posts. Is that now a book?
On the other end of the spectrum we have social media posts which are anything but.
To be clear and honest: I don't think it's really true in the way it's meant.
I think people have gotten in this mode where they're only interested in the things that are being pushed in front of them by a feed, whether that's advertising or social media. It isn't that they lack books about things they are interested in, it's that they lack interests unless they think that following that interest could result in social capital. Seeing somebody getting those updoots on the feed creates the interest.
But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.
I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.
I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).
Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly.
I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page.
However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible.
It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.
Writing has been around for thousands of years. But it caught on extremely slowly. It took thousands of years to spread across the globe. For thousands of years being literate was rare. The printing press changed things a lot, but books and the education needed to use them remained uncommon. Until pretty recently, a person’s daily life looked a lot like their grandparents’ did.
Things started picking up. Electricity went from zero to ubiquitous in a few generations. So did mechanized transport, radio, TV, and telephones.
It’s faster than that today. Most people today communicate using systems that didn’t exist at all when I was a child. At work, we’re all using tools that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
The “check back in a few centuries” doesn’t work, because we’re not going to be using the same stuff in a few centuries. We’re probably not going to be using the same stuff in a few decades. We didn’t have time to figure out the ramifications of doomscrolling before it became ubiquitous, and we’ll probably have even less time to figure out the next thing.
As a society, we have this silly habit of dismissing criticisms of incoming societal shifts because previous ones “turned out fine”. We grab the most extreme of the bad contrarian takes of the time and use it to ridicule the position as a whole. We often ignore those previous shifts were influenced by the criticisms of the time (not all of them bad) and that how it turned out was a result of the push and pull.
In other words, we need to have the people pointing out the bad parts of the change, to have any chance that it’ll actually turn out good.
Another thing often ignored is that shifts are happening more frequently and at larger scales, and we’ve seen them become out of control. All the more reason to take a breather a move slower.
https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...
We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes.
AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)
The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
I disagree with this take so strongly. Yes, in practice people are lazy and they're just going to ask for the answer. But the potential for AIs to give targeted answers to specific questions about academic topics is so far ahead of anything I had going through undergrad or my master's program that it would be an epic missed opportunity not to leverage it in the educational process. I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.
AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.
For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in.
Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.
Looked up this phrase and found the book of the same name, not sure if you were making a reference to the book but from the short synopsis I saw it seems like a very prophetic book for being written 50 years ago and I can see how many of his predictions are coming true, I will order a copy for sure now.
Your post and this book describe a phenomenon that I have always felt but never seen described before, thanks
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
Some even equate attention discipline to intelligence of all things.
I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around.
I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
"Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"
The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.
If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you.
There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion:
Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.
Here is Wallace on this subject: “Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
Also you cannot anonymously scroll on mobile browser for long, prompts to install the app.
Yeah, there's lot of junk on YouTube. You might even say 90% of it. But there's tons of useful content too if you go searching for it.
In general most that an edutainment can give you is awareness that something exists and a bit of motivation to get you going and there is some value in that. Whether on the whole it’s a positive thing is a bit harder to say.
Edutainment is a spectrum, while you are correct that everyone should understand they can't "learn quantum theory" in a way that can be applied meaningfully by watching videos, sparking intellectual curiosity and learning new topics/areas of interest is a good thing in general. And most edutainment that isn't so flawed/simplistic as to be wrong is better than watching an influencer whose dayjob is churning out weekly content with some alluring hook to grab viewers and mostly just inane lowest common denominator filler around it.
PBS NOVA Documentary > PBS Spacetime on YT >> YT "Fun" Science Content > TikTok "Fun" Science Content >> YT Influencer Content > TikTok Influencer Content >> YT Ragebait/AI Slop > TikTok Ragebait/AI Slop
Sesame Street isn't nearly as harmful for young kids as 2 minute TikTok AI videos that next play into God knows what. It has interesting inoffensive characters teaching useful language and social skills.
(I can't honestly say that I go and start doing chemistry after listening to NileRed...)
Start with some topic that people are posting about, a book you are reading, or even just something you overhear. Pick a claim that's being made, and ask your self: where does this claim come from? is this true? how do they know this? Don't stop until you find a solid answer or the trail goes cold.
Amazingly often, the trail goes cold, and you find no one has written anything definitive on the question you've been asking. This bubble we've created has disturbingly thin walls, and only our herd mentality is holding us back from popping our heads out.
Maybe this was just the writing style at the time. 200 pages of storytelling, world building, details and plot development and then 20 pages to resolve and finish up. Frequently it doesn't even feel rushed, it is just less clear cut ending than newer books.
Most recent example I came across is Kramer vs Kramer. It's a short book overall, but the main plot is no more than 10% of the book and the resolution is two or three pages and then it just stops.
And sometimes it’s just affirming to read an author describe a character thinking the same thoughts one has or the same situation one finds oneself in.
I will also say that to me there is a massive difference between how much effort it takes to read one type of fiction versus another. I was reading Master and Margarita and I stopped because they simply kept introducing new characters and doing jumps for no reason. I'm sure I will get a bunch of well-read people telling me it's because I'm a poor reader or whatever, but I think that's bad writing.
2 episodes left before next season!Most language is invented by children and most of what they invent dies pretty quickly. You transition from not noticing it's new because you weren't alive before to keeping up to falling behind to getting annoyed.
rizz no cap sus swag YOLO such wow pwned that's what she said fo shizzle crunk bling talk to the hand as if homeskillet not! take a chill pill grody gag me with a spoon
Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
I don't think it applies to a series of blog posts even if they reach book length, though.
Read "Amusing ourselves to death" for exemple; written as a criticism of TV-media in the 80s but even more applicable on the short-form content of today.
Put Toqueville in a time-machine. Would he really regard the current state of society as something that should be aspired to?
Watch a televised primary or presidential debate from mid 20th century and you will be astounded at the quality of argument and focus of the discussion.
I think most people severely underestimate how far public discourse has fallen.
After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker.
Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)
Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
No more getting anxious and worked up about small things and picking fights with my partner.
When you are trying to have none, it's suddenly everywhere and in your face without realising it.
a few withdrawal pangs, but the mainstream version is a nope.
I'll keep checking my city page every now and then as long as my self-hosted eddrit instance keeps working.
Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best.
> Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
Thank you for the statement!
If the algorithm simply says "sort by most recent", then it is pretty good.
It is the profit driven algorithms that are doing the damage.
And then, even if you did achieve a truly personalized feed, there will be accusations you're limiting your worldview to a filter bubble**. And sure, you are. Still beats algorithmic rage-baiting. It's up to you to figure out how much you wish to engage IMO, not some tech company or virtue signaling concern troll influencer.
*An LLM is an algorithm too, duh.
I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin.
Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists.
After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those.
My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading.
I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen.
You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.
It was marketed precisely on this point; it being a "nerve stimulant", "brain tonic", cure all for hysteria, melancholy, and more. There's a great article on it here. [1] Coke also got defensive on this point because not only was it referred to as "dope" and other such drug implicit terms, but people also began pointing out the issues with coke and cocaine.
Nobody knows exactly how much cocaine was in the original concoctions, but it is known that they began rapidly reducing the amount once the issue started being discussed. Of course I can also see that being argued as evidence of them having a bunch (oyyy, shut it down!), or indeed having a negligible amount (bahh, let's nip this nonsense in the bud). Either way it had a very non-zero amount, and people were consuming it in absurd quantities. If you believe Coke's response, 90% of all businessmen were "constant patrons."
[1] - https://clickamericana.com/topics/food-drink/cocaine-laced-c...
I don't agree. I don't know anybody snorting caffeine lines and it doesn't have all the connotations of an illicit drug either.
> It was marketed precisely on this point
Sure, but that was then, not today. That mismatch is part of why this outrage is misplaced.
Its exact potency are going to be impossible to assess because the only people that knew how much cocaine was in each serving, early on, took it to the grave with themselves. But the thing we can say is that (1) it was very non-zero and (2) consumption of said non-zero amount of cocaine was relatively widespread.
Again I think it works very well as an analog to modern times. It's fairly certain that companies have run internal studies on addictiveness since 'engagement' is already little more than a euphemism for such, kept at arm's reach. Those studies will never see the light of day, and have almost certainly been long since wiped, so we'll never know exactly how much they knew. Other than they obviously knew and know that they're intentionally creating and providing a product that is extremely addictive, and exploiting that for economic benefit.
Origins: “RTFM”. “What’s the switch for ls that prints time stamps?”
“Read the fucking manual.”
"Yes, I know heroin is scary, but no, I am using it as a metaphor, and that couple has very little to do with me and you, so whats the problem? It's not like they sold you or me off." Is probably what I'll say.
It also brings to mind the OG of drug metaphors: "Religion is the opiate of the masses" nobody really chided him when he wrote that.
For someone nitpicking on details surely you noticed that nobody said that. This is a strawman you created to drag the parent poster's point off-topic.
> "The equivalence is obviously false"
And Opium is obviously not an "algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain", so clearly the poster who "sees no difference" does actually see differences, just not in the point they are making.
It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL!
1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4QL5EnHgvc
This is apparently an extremely offending video according to some anon reddit inquisitor.
I took his advice, I wont let it happen again.
The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.
If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.
Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.
I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.
Reading non-fiction about some current topic isn’t that bad in comparison.
Which will probably be quite bad, but then, influencer-generated entertainment media was quite bad, so maybe we won’t be too much worse off.
As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.
Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?
But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.
And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.
Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.
The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.
This is an attitude I had when I was 19 and had spent a bunch of time and money going to school. I had a life event that made me leave school and take on a huge debt that had to be paid. Most people learn - they just learn in context of their necessity and their own passions. For other things, they lean on the community around them (doctors, lawyers, accountants, software engineers etc...)
> AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning.
I'm watching the huddled masses start to figure it out. AI is going to be to arrogant intellectualism what the gun was to the knight. Now anyone who can operate a mobile phone (and literacy is not required) has access to a shocking level of expertise and contextualized knowledge. And as AI improves this will be more and more the case.
> constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary
First prompts of non developer employees were "what does ___ mean?". Real time vocabulary is a thing now.
> “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.
It's not a joke. AI is going to reshape society. It's just started. Back to the gun analogy - the knights are just now starting to realize that proficiency with a sword and 70kg of armor are no match for a peasant with a pistol. Likewise, I suspect that Joe six-pack with AI in his pocket can do knowledge work at a "way good enough" level. I don't want to accept it, but that seems to be reality.
This isn’t a metaphor/analogy that works. There is a parallel in the introduction of a tool that has more “firepower” but that isn’t the crux of the issue when it comes to intelligence.
You can give fable to someone who has never written code before and someone who has experience writing SW. Your outcomes are very different.
The crux of the matter is that you need to know what “good” looks like to use automation or augmentation tools well. This is why it’s a greater boost to people with experience.
You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position.
If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale.
If you remember school, most students didn’t want to be there. Homework exercises are something you would rather avoid.
America and the west, as class mobility became increasingly dependent on education, repeated the patterns in China and India. People went to college not because they wanted to study the subject, but because it got you a decent income when you got out.
In all these situations, you have people who aren’t there for the journey, but there for the outcome. (For that matter, even people who want to study, will take the easy way out.)
Having seen people use AI to study, it can be useful, especially if the underlying text books and notes are bad. However there are already many YouTube videos made by experts covering those topics, so the uplift here isn’t magical.
> I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.
This is a matter of belief, and in a vacuum it’s something most people would agree with. The issue is what the outcomes actually are.
Consider computers in education. Education has been trying to cram “technology” into the process for decades. Every student in my kid’s elementary school has a laptop. It’s critical to education today. But is it actually improving education? I don’t see any indication of that. As far as I can see, everyone decided that computers were important to have in education, so they made it happen, without ever checking to see if it actually helped.
How would you estimate actual gains and losses to education for LLMs? What would good look like?
Hell yeah. Trudging a mile through the snow and ice from West Campus to the Engineering Quad to sit in my TA's office hours so I could hope to ask a question about problem 19 because I don't understand the second half of it is a vastly worse use of time than firing up Gemini and saying "I'm taking partial differential equations, and I'm seeing a problem where I have to..."
I would kill to go back through undergrad with an AI by my side as I study, or even in class, so when the professor loses me 10 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, I have a hope of getting back on the train and not having the lecture be a waste.
Worldnews bans you instantly if you disagree with Israel. That's a default sub, yeah? Left or right wing?
> This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.
But check out r/pics & r/interestingasfuck
They are crazy especially after Oct 7. Constant pro-pali posts.
/r/sweden is a leftie craphole. same with /r/tillsverige and /r/svenskpolitik
I don't agree with your rhetorical statement about the nature of my argument. I'm not trying to disavow any costs. I'm saying that AI represents a unique opportunity in the history of humanity to encapsulate knowledge and carry it through space and time in a highly scalable way.
We have an epidemic of schools doing poorly in educating our students with constantly dropping standards, and an unwillingness to raise teachers' salaries. Education is extraordinarily expensive and I anticipate LLMs can be incorporated into a larger automated course load that is not stuck in the rigorous, true/false analysis that other automated systems have been stuck with in the past.
LLMs are already excellent at critiquing humans' writing and providing feedback that a talented editor would typically have to be paid to provide.
So, to summarize, the gains will be in the average cost of a high school education, the availability of that education across the world, the reliability of the information presented in the course curriculum, and the consistency with which we can educate at scale.
Including the vast amount of gooner bait for pedophile losers who got no attention from women in their life? I doubt that
let's not kid ourselves by saying western writers didn't/don't write the same things.
I don't need anyone to pick me, thank you very much.