> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
My 2 cents:
1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.'
More here
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a...
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine.
-Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities.
-Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.
On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?
There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.
I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.
From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.
If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.
Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more efficient to build a high level map of the subject using podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and the end result is the same.
Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.
Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...
The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.
The point these focus-deprived children could accurately make is that our adult world is also about reward hacking and bullshit metrics. I’m old but I will tell you that everything I dislike that I see in the young is society’s fault. We did a truly terrible job of giving them a world in which to become better, rather than worse, people.
In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.
I also see that in real world too. Too many times I wished a book existed to learn this or that and got an answer that you really need to hang out in multiple Discord groups to stay up-to-date. Newer generation apparently has less difficulty with that.
Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that theoretical education leaves open.
From my experience it is obviously the latter. Reading well, on paper or on screen, really requires you to put your complete attention to it. Audio (podcasts) and video (youtube) have the advantage of not requiring your complete attention. Everything else follows from that. Of course it can fit some people better. Just not where it matters.
There’s no such thing as multitasking. It is a literal illusion and is one big reason why people who can’t sit down and actually read a book (or lie down with eyes closed and LISTEN to a podcast/lecture) produce for themselves the illusion of understanding.
Yeah. I struggle to understand how podcasts and youtube are an efficient learning resource. They are slow, unstructured, and unsearchable. Whilst some software can ameliorate some of these (e.g. playback speed control), there's no analogue to the process of "can skip this paragraph, can skip this paragraph, let's search back for the definition of this term, let's cross-reference this term with this other text, let's see how many pages are left in this chapter...".
I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of everything having to be a video. I can read much-much faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow. So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10 minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to smash that bell because it helps me so much"...
It's not about being old fashioned. If you can't maintain focus to read a book, you're obviously not truly engaging with the material. How far are you going to get in a field, if you're reliant on having everything explained to you in simple terms.
YouTube and podcasts are fine as an introduction to a topic, but they are and do encourage passive consumption. It's fine for reciting shallow factoids in class and getting grades, but won't make you an expert in a field. If you can't maintain enough attention to read, you'll always have to rely on processed, second hand information. That's why reading needs to be taught as a skill, and heavily encouraged.
I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes.
When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.
Isn't it also because of a change in testing methods? It seems to me that multiple choice tests are more and more widespread. These can be gamed more easily, since you can often eliminate some of the choices based on knowledge unrelated to the correct answer.
For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test ever. Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe. Everything was problems, proofs, or essays.
I haven't seen an increase in multiple choice tests in my area (mathematics). We still require written answers and proofs. Some testing is computer-based but it requires entry of formulated results properly.
I find three challenges with YouTube and podcasts:
1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.
2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.
3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life
That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.
It's sad on the human level too. A family member or friend may have a difficult issue that takes more than 2 minutes to discuss, but a person won't have the attention span to listen.
No wonder therapists are raking it in and short supply.
The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.
The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.
Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.
> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].
Proof needed. You can't just say that.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.
The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.
And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades
Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?
Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.
When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.
Remember when films used to be a tight 90 minutes of snappy editing. Now everything is getting close to 3 hours, it's not because the stories are better or more complex it's people not being ruthless in their editing.
I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing words.
Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to focus their effort.
That is very true, although I also have the opposite example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one for calculus) were so dense with information that I could not make head and tails
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
Keep in mind that some of the criteria have changed as well over time, probably not as fast as technology itself, but skills like reading comprehension are tested for less in favor of e.g. tech literacy.
Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with: "Use decent software. And make copies."
And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?
It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
> you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh"
But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so that putting the burden on the individual is made manageable.
To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
The individual solution is insufficient in this case. Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the level of population statistics, it means there's a systemic cause that's stronger than most people's willpower.
You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on?
I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context.
Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.
On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.
I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.
They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.
I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.
People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group
Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
- things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job"
- people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be true.
> things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable
"Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here.
Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value.
FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc.
Did they ever speak out against torture, or illegal war? How much? Did they ever go into the long term advantages of Jill Stein's economic plans; or Bernie's? How much?
The fact that we spent over $8 trillion in a murderous money laundering scheme should have been front page news every day for years. The opportunity cost of all that fuckery, from a rational economic perspective, is mind blowing.
The Overton Window is now looking onto bipartisan genocide, after decades of bipartisan illegal war. You need to get outside of that frame, or else corporate media looks almost sane.
> people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases
People like Musk buy news sources to spread their biases. Same for Murdoch, Turner, Bezos, etc.
It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant:
> Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
- Alanis Obomsawin
This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years.
Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
The issue isn't about "screen vs. print", the issue is about "critical, discerning, questioning mind" vs. "mindless consumerism".
The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers.
It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior.
And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1].
I think it's much more fundamental than this; the new speed and new methods with which information can be spread are themselves the problem. Misinformation is downstream of this. The more fundamental problem seems to be tribalism, which sort of information can be spread quickly, (anything with strong emotional content, outrage, etc.) and the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding. (eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round? Or, do they know the earth is round because this is what they've been taught. I'll bet most of HN does understand this, but most people could no produce this if asked without any sort of preparation.)
The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.
> the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding
This hits the nail on the head. In the end, I am trusting other people to do the experiments and reporting the findings.
I can regurgitate a lot of stuff about science, but in the end I believe it because I grew on the scientist side of the fence. If you look at conspiracy theories, the thing they always do is come up with a reason not to believe in the established authorities.
“when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow readers.
I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows you to context switch to a million different things, and even an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work.
There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours to the library/store to return the old one and download a new one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero, you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you took the time to pick out.
Writing digitally is cheaper but that's exactly why distributing or getting reach is not cheap at all. You still need cost and proof of work in getting noticed by algorithms, as well as people who usually set trends. In fact, the lower cost of production means that more niche things get written than there would have been a market for.
> Only selected few buy books, because it costs money
I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)
A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and physical destruction.
Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?
The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.
I went and checked the page in another browser with my adblocker off. Wow. Just wow. I started using ad blockers on everything a few years ago because they became a little too annoying. I somehow missed when the web became nigh unusable from them.
>“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,”
This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged.
So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms.
Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
>Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.
Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise.
But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like:
>The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.
I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language. Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a higher standard in a piece about literature and written media and books.
Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.
Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.
I put random paragraphs into a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level assessment calculator, which suggests the US school grade level required to understand the assessed text. It consistently returned between Grade 8 and 9.
I can’t help but imagine some of the folks this message is referring to as “needing to read more” seeing this and dismissing it as using language of “the elites”. There’s a certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.
I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers: git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)
Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.
That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
>You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with the corpus of works.
In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the next 6 months.
Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to all the journals legally unlike the average person.
Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the
individual, it undermines all social institutions.
A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological
Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and
meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people
talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration
in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth,
veracity.
Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in
one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it
everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it -
rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at
this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and
record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less
"unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic
test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do
you really know about the relation between an LED and covert
surveillance.
In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge
and maybe to use it in a different way.
I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment.
Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.
I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons.
So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.
This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep.
You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.
We presume that it is us who have digested the thinness of the veil of reality who should be deciding epistemological questions but it is the younger generations who have grown up in this environment of 'Hacking the Matrix' who have the moral right to do it.
> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
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