
The death of reading is threatening the soul - tamersalama
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/07/21/the-death-of-reading-is-threatening-the-soul/
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illegal_in_ca
_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.

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

~~~
yumaikas
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
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.

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openclosed
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
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.

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Fifer82
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
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.

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rwnspace
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.

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z3t4
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
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 :)

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gnicholas
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.

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atemerev
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
Some relevant HN Thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686212)

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sohkamyung
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.

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martinmusio7
Luckily, there is a reading mode in most browsers...

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zmix
How can/could Elon Musk read two books a day?

~~~
arkh
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.

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DrScump
WP missed the irony that they paywall their own site, which inhibits reading
of _their_ content, anyway.

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mto
tl;dr

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SubiculumCode
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
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.

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ggm
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.

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mrkrabo
>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
The Shallows
[http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16](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.

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cft
Sole is a fish. You meant soul in the title

