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.
Kids see adults who don't read so why should they?
It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to become successful because nobody has the reading or concentration skills.
When I was a child I taught myself English by playing Planescape Torment.
My kids convinced me to try out a couple of those old final fantasy games from the 90s. As someone who studied Kabbalah I was intrigued by the fact that they named a character Sephiroth, although the character really had nothing to do with the name or concept. Anyway, I was already old so I didn’t have the same emotional connection (except when that girl was killed) because neither the writing nor the realism was at a level I hadn’t seen before. It definitely would have hit me hard at 13, though. Really hard.
Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.
The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.
Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
Funny that. I'm part of the generation really hit by FF7, and it was indeed quite memorable. I have plenty of memorable books read around the same era too. Also... I guess 'writing' in video games covers a lot more than just words.
Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
I often find the voice acting to be interminably slow and distracting and immersion breaking somehow. You are just waiting for the voice actor to slowly emote it all. I like how Morrowind did it when questing. Some flavor voice to set the mood and then great writing you read. Full voice acting for important parts and scenes.
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.
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.
Surely an article can cover a process end-to-end, just as a video can focus on only a critical part. Do you mean that the medium of video encourages the author to be more thorough?
That's fair. Someone commented in a different fork that videos are good for DIY jobs, and I totally agree. You want to see a person doing it live, so you can imitate their motions. I was thinking about learning something theoretical, like mathematics or history.
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"...
Not only written text is a faster way to communicate information, it is so because it has much bigger context window:
"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.
"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.
In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.
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.
There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.
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.
Europe is entering a crisis of unprecedented proportions. This isn't just an isolated incident, one bad company, this is a trend. It used to be that subsidies managed to balance out the over-regulation, high labor costs and powerful pressure groups Europe was known for. Now it's no longer the case.
There used to be a technological edge European countries (especially in the west) could rely on, which made them more suitable for some business. But now it's gone, almost everywhere. Exception is couple of important, but niche industries, which are seen as being of strategic interest (Airbus, ASML, Arianne). But they too feel the pinch now, as the supply chains get more fragile, new talent leaves, or doesn't even show up, and foreign powers prop up their own alternatives.
Add incapable, or shortsighted, political leadership, aging population, hostile, or at least unfriendly, neighbors and rising political extremism, and you get a particularly deadly mix.
Unfortunately, the top institutions have shown almost zero acceptance of the fact.
In that sort of situation the only "hope" is that the collapse will be relatively quick, allowing for some rebuilding to start before the next decade ends. If we are lucky.
Sadly but true. The latest issue is that the EC would rather see the auto industry fail than to change its climate objectives. It looks like it gotten so bad that Germany started speaking up against emissions goals and most likely would try to block any measures.
I don't think Arianne is successful as it relies on traditional technology to launch things into space and they can't be competitive with SpaceX.
The EU is the laughing stock of the world: AI regulation is in force, but no single AI company in Europe :)) - just to name one example.
Those climate objectives are necessary. Soon we will be spending a lot more on disaster mitigation than we would have on some EV subsidies. If anything the transition is not fast enough. I'm living very close to Valencia with its recent flooding disaster, that it didn't happen here was just a matter of chance. That week alone has cost the country more than 10 billion in damage payments and the actual damage is a lot bigger than that. And that's not even considering the hundreds that were killed.
And cars aren't as important here as in the US. I haven't owned or driven one in 7 years.
I agree that ariane isn't doing well but it's really niche anyway.
They're worthless if the rest of the world is not on board with you.
If you're the only one on board, all you're doing is making your domestic industry uncompetitive and your working class citizens poorer via high energy prices, while the largest polluting nations are destroying the planet further while also getting richer thanks to not giving a crap about the environment and eating away your share of world GDP.
What EU is doing is like trying to loose weight by cutting your own legs off calling it a good policy.
> They're worthless if the rest of the world is not on board with you.
Not really. The EU is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. Our change will help. And the rest will have to follow eventually because they are also affected. And they will be in a bigger hurry and it will cost more.
> If you're the only one on board, all you're doing is making your domestic industry uncompetitive and your working class citizens poorer via high energy prices, while the largest polluting nations are destroying the planet further while also getting richer thanks to not giving a crap about the environment and eating away your share of world GDP.
Also, it's not a race we have to win. Life is not about becoming the richest.
>Also, it's not a race we have to win. Life is not about becoming the richest.
It is, if you want to maintain the generous welfare and high standard of living the EU is used to. Where do you think that money comes from, the sky? It comes from having a world dominant economy. Without that, there's no more money for good wages, pensions and welfare and the people won't be happy with that.
Otherwise, the EU citizens will either have to be contempt to being poorer, OR, more likely, they'll vote another Austrian painter to power to upset the apple cart.
We don't need to get even richer is what I mean. It's fine.
I even moved to a lower wage country within the EU (about half as much as I would be able to make at home) to get a better quality of life. There's enough flex, we are still one of the richest regions in the world.
Being from the country with probably the worst pension system (and a government that is doubling down on it) with year on year deficit, and generational wealth gap, it's rich saying "we don't need to get richer".
They can prepare better for natural disasters. And while climate change is an issue, we have the technology to fight it and not bankrupting entire industries to achieve some far fetched green goals.
You might not like cars, but a lot of other people do.
These goals aren't far-fetched though. We're really far behind the curve as humanity. We need to do this sooner rather than later.
Don't forget there is a huge latency in CO2 emissions and their effect. The CO2 we're saving now will only take effect in 20 year's time. The next 20 years of increasingly worst disasters are already locked in. In 20 years doing what we should do now will feel easy.
I know the US will probably pull out of the climate accords again now that trump will be president but that's no reason for the rest of the world to do nothing. Even China is making lots of headway.
But it also means we can't really keep living as we are. People really need to switch to EVs if they want to have a car. Also sooner rather than later. But here in the cities in Europe we're seeing less people owning cars and more and more excellent public transport. Which is even better, you can use it after drinking, you don't have to pick it up from the place you left it off, you can read a book while using it, there's no maintenance or insurance. It helps climate and it's an easier mode to travel.
You do know how much CO2 is expended to make batteries, no? The fact that is not done in Europe doesn't make it less bad. Those mining machines don't run on water, you know, they run on tons and tons of diesel.
True, and in my opinion a proof that Europe has potential to recover. Unfortunately it remains to be seen if they manage to survive oncoming regulator onslaught.
America innovates, Europe regulates and China copies.
It was a parallel that in the EU we have regulations for things that there are no successful companies in the field and even if some companies will do AI in Europe, they will not be able to compete globally because they are chained by regulations. And with regulations that do not into account the economic realities, like the slow killing of the auto industry with the push for EVs even if very few people actually want them.
As an EU citizen I really applaud the AI regulation. And I work on implementing AI too.
If we look at how the big social media experiment panned out, polarising society through engagement-driven algorithms, it was important to prevent this happening with AI. The same with adtech which caused too much surveillance.
Because it's much harder to put the genie back in the bottle when companies are already heavily relying on it for their business model. We try to steer the industry towards business models that benefit society as well.
AI is nice but it's important to make sure it doesn't undermine society as social media certainly has done. And the regulation is not outrageous. It's mostly common sense.
I'm also an EU citizen and I very much like to see SkyNet happen.
Joke aside, these regulations, however "common sense" they look like, it will make the EU lag behind every other country when the genie comes out of the bottle. So instead of being at the forefront of AI, or close, the EU will be in the last place.
> The latest issue is that the EC would rather see the auto industry fail than to change its climate objectives.
I don't think climate objectives are the problem. The auto industry wants to see them reduced because they want to keep pumping out diesel engine cars, i.e., making us buy obsolete technology while tariffs prevent us from buying cheaper and better foreign EVs. Do you really think that's the path to keeping our auto industry in the long term?
If climate objectives were more ambitious and weren't being pushed forward all the time due to industry lobbying, we would probably see more innovation in Europe.
If diesel is bad, why not just say "make gas powered cars and hybrids only, no more diesel for consumer cars under 3.5T or 7T"? Seems easier than the current agenda.
Yes. That is very much given. In fact some of it has already happened.
Europe has effectively ceded it's position in Africa to others some time ago.
Aid based approach has led to little tangible benefit for locals, and even less for Europeans. Furthermore, conditions the recipient needed to fulfill were, and still are, often hard to accept for cultural and historical reasons. Add to it the lack of actual power projection and all you have is contempt.
It's pretty visible during any UN vote.
Simply put, investment beats aid, every single time.
The silver lining is that Russia is having it's own issues, not entirely different but similarly horrible. Namely demographic crisis, exacerbated by war and poor public health.
There is also demographic crisis in China, however their government has been wise enough to not go to all out war.
Locals matter only when it's convenient. Note that this agreement wasn't negotiated with people who lived on Chagos islands, but with government that claims the territory.
And yet the energy prices are so high that they drive companies to cut production. Especially in countries which banked on renewables the most (along with gas).
That's the "hot" period of the war. Before that there were several centuries long war of attrition between Dunedain, their allies and proxies of Sauron.
The capital city of Gondor, Osgiliath, was turned into ruins, front going straight through. And before that, the same thing happened to Minas Ithil. Those big towers next to Black Gate? Those were fortifications built by Gondor. But after Great Plague, which was probably a biological weapon of sorts, there weren't enough people to man them.
What we see in lotr, is essentially last days of war. When one side is barely clinging on, and can muster only localized offensives.
Problem is that it's not sustainable. We can't defend ourselves, our economies are de-industrializing, we have right and left radical taking over political spectrum all the while our pension and healthcare systems are moving ever closer to a breaking point.
The careful approach may have brought as pretty far. But isn't working anymore. It hasn't worked since 2008 at least.
> We can't defend ourselves, our economies are de-industrializing, we have right and left radical taking over political spectrum all the while our pension and healthcare systems are moving ever closer to a breaking point.
Other than the defense part, the same could be said for the US.
The US has very rosy economic future projections compared to Europe, and frankly the rest of the world. Don't be fooled by sensational headlines and chronically online college kids complaining.
Rosy in comparison to the rest of the world - maybe
Rosy in comparison to 1976~2000 - no
I'm under the impression it's been (sort of) proven (but I have no source) that the major reason for 'college kids complaining' is precisely because of the perceived loss in quality of life, purchasing power and access to {healtchare, safety, community, third spaces} when compared to prior generations
I'm glad you mentioned 'perceived' loss in quality of life. I think that is what is being argued, does the perception meet the reality?
It could be that the major reason for 'college kids perception of loss in quality of life' is that the rise of ad-driven media, as opposed to the previous generation's subscription model, leads to more sensationalized news to drive clicks. Combine that with online forums (echo chambers) that make it easier to complain to a sympathetic audience. College kids are also more susceptible to recency bias, they didn't live through previous times of uncertainty and have no memories of cold wars or the turbulence that previous generations lived through.
To me it seems that even software engineers and bankers in US and UK, at least those who don’t have parental support, will struggle to ever attain the things that are achievable to moderately ambitious european kids from the lowest wealth and income deciles at 25-30 in a wide range of professions: 40 hour workweeks, comfortable middle class lifestyle, home ownership in appreciating, investment grade old real estate in historical city centres.
Not sure that the US has worked since 2008 either. The streets are full of homeless. Half the population is angry enough (about what I'm not sure), that they are about to elect a self described dictator.
Your concerns are legitimate but the dream of an ever growing production isn’t sustainable either. But that is ok: not being the most powerful within a group is totally fine.
On the defense issue, I don’t really see where the threat would come from.
Russia isn’t in such a great place militarily either. It would be incredibly culturally strange for China to invade that far away and I don’t know that their military is configured for that anyway. They may influence and sabotage but would never attack Europe militarily IMO. Middle East and North Africa states don’t pose much of a threat still in an actual military conflict.
Maybe the criminal gangs, who already have capacity rivaling and sometimes surpassing European governments?
Or maybe killing, gang raping, shooting, bombing and looting is not an actual military conflict, because the soldiers don't wear uniforms, and thus nothing for the busy Europeans to mind.
Those are big problems, but the issue is a lack of will, not a lack of military strength. If the will situation changed those threats could be gone within a week.
We are getting old, are having few if any children, yet our social contract is built on a series of Ponzi schemes that become unmaintainable under such circumstances. The temporary band-aid fix of mass migration is seemingly bringing many old and proud nations to a boiling point. We like our regulations, we like our welfare state, we like our extensive holidays and work life balance, and we’re not willing to budge on any of them, really. There’s too many contradictions in the system now. I’m not sure what it would take for this “will” to materialise, but I’m afraid if it does happen, it’ll come about due to some form of neo-fascism than a glorious rejuvenation of our current political order.
If the will doesn’t materialise, well, that’s exactly what civilisational collapse looks like in the historical record.
Either way, I’m not really seeing the optimistic outlook for Europe.
That's laughable. Or really, it's tragicomic. If you don't have the will power, you have nothing. How can you not have the will to defend your civilians against the most horrible crimes and looting from organized criminals? Saying that you could fix it if you only wanted sounds like a guy in a bar saying he could beat you if only he wanted. Sure.
In South America they do put in the military against criminal gangs. Why don't the Europeans? Especially considering that the criminal gangs there are predominately consisting of foreigners, meaning they are de-facto a military matter.
So you'd rather if they didn't prepare? I'm sorry I don't understand the point of your comment. If USA turns to authoritarian principles, then it won't really matter what Space force does at this point.
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