Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history?
I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.
I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.
An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.
> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?
Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently understand things gestures generally than someone who gets everything from articles online.
How could less correlated reading, no matter how high the quality, possibly compare to a solid book - in use of time or depth of impact?
The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.
Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.
If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, uncorrelated in who finds and reads them, the page count would have to increase 10x, perhaps much more.
I think the major difference is that this article describes some meta concept. Despite being abstract its very concrete. If 2 people read something that is fantasy or even describing a physical process like wood carving. Despite reading the same thing both parties have an entirely different picture of what happened. The clothes on the people are different, the building they occupy is different, the wood you are carving is different, the tools you use are different. These difference are actually the most increasing details which your brain fills in, and this is something completely different from when you watch TV. All the details are filled its concrete and non-abstract. It can still be a compeling story or piece of art but often people are are much worst artist and visual things rarely capture all the things your brain can fill in for detail that make something cohesive. And the details they fill in are often details your brain finds mundane and ignores entirely.
I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).
There is also a weird, robust mortality relationship where book readers live longer than periodical readers "regardless of gender, health, wealth, or education" [1]. In those studies, the threshold was 30 minutes of book reading a day.
While this is just a rule of thumb, I consider moderate exercise, reading, and socializing to be roughly equivalent in positive health benefits. I try to get a little bit of each every day, and then try to have longer sessions of each once or twice a week.
> I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve.
This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.
His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.
My favorite part of How to Read a Book is how it classifies books into books worth skimming over, books worth reading each word exactly once, and books worith studying and actively engaging with in depth.
How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.
I’ve read it a few times both on my own and with my kids. I could maybe buy 50-60% of the length would be ideal, but not 10%.
Ironically, one of the points made in the book—and close to your point—is that even in the greatest book of all time there are passages that are more and less worthwhile. The art of being a good reader is identifying the worthwhile and going over it slowly (maybe even rereading it) and identifying the less worthy and going over it quick.
The nice thing about spending more time with HTRAB is it forces you to think about reading. That’s a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.
Paul Graham recently: The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
Interesting, I struggle to read. I always have. But I genuinely enjoyed it. Few years back I told a colleague that by the time I reach the end of paragraph I forget how it started. He told me sounds like a learning difficulty. So I did a test, thinking I was dyslexic. It turns out I have ADHD with particularly bad short term memory.
Anyways my question for everyone here, how do you read with ADHD? How do you over come reading the same passage multiple time?
The easiest way to counter it is just leave your phone at home and take a book and go to a public bench and read. You will quickly condition your brain to no longer need to constantly be looking at a screen to be happy.
Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
>Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.
People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.
If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.
The simplest version of this, which I did myself, is just to have less food in the house. Stop buying snacks, only get items you have a planned meal for, and you spend a lot less willpower resisting the temptation to grab stuff while you're already in the kitchen or etc.
It's harder to modify what restaurants and online orders are available to you, but maybe you can work up to blocking or uninstalling those apps or something?
Recapitulating an old comment. Start by quitting all algorithmic, ad-driven social media.
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over for Facebook over a decade ago:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook (read: your main social media) app on your phone; then
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps (read: all other social media) on your phone; next
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account.
But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been about a decade since I've cared to log into Facebook. Last time I tried, it felt like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox more than anything compelling.)
Not in a religious way, just have a no screens day every week, once a month, or just once.
You can get by one day without texting, looking for directions, getting an answer from google, ordering takeout, etc. etc. etc. Set yourself a boundary, no phones unless there's a fire or somebody needs to go to the hospital and stick to it. Make a schedule.
Is reading morally superior? It seems like greater society (with the apps) is rapidly changing back to an oral culture which seems to be humanity’s default setting.
> He obviously meant "is choosing to spend your time reading morally superior", though
Sure. I'm answering it by another measure. Killing is, ceteris paribus, morally inferior to not killing. I'd argue a psychopath is henceforth morally debilitated despite it not really being their "fault" that they're born without empathy. This, in turn, helps me conclude that a murderer is, in fact, doing wrong.
Same here. Someone who can't read isn't inherently less morally capable than someone who can. What reading gives one is the capacity to gain a better understanding of ethics and morals. So I'd guess folks who read books are, on average, more intelligent and at least seeking to conduct themselves in a more moral fashion than someone who doesn't. But that doesn't make spending time reading morally superior to some other activity.
For a long time learning required a primary attention of a person. Usually a monopoly attention. You can't read printed text and do something else in parallel (fidgeting doesn't count). Radio and TV facilitated background viewing and listening but there weren't many options to personalize those. And then IT revolution happened and humanity discovered that they can do something as a primary attention task and "learn" in background by listening to a narrated educational media. And with the invention of speed-up, those people are now debating is x2 speed-up too slow, and just how fast can they go while still discerning words.
it's my personal hot-take, but I think that a majority of those background listeners are doing performative "learning" and aren't learning anything really. It's just to brag once a year that they have "read" 100+ books in a year and post a wall of covers or a number on their social network feed.
Basically, books aren't morally superior media than anything else really. But focused and monopoly attention dedicated to some media is morally superior to a performative background "learning". Books simply eliminate even a possibility of reading them in background.
at work we started making a libary with books we want to read to keep us sane and adopting good and old practices in the world of ai. its very easy to get blind nowdays but reading have helped me alot
I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.
I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.
An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.
Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently understand things gestures generally than someone who gets everything from articles online.
The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.
Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.
If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, uncorrelated in who finds and reads them, the page count would have to increase 10x, perhaps much more.
I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).
Have they found a modern day metric that we should all be hunting in our quest for reading health? A literary equivalent to the daily 10,000 steps?
Maybe 10,000 words!
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/
This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.
His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.
How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.
Ironically, one of the points made in the book—and close to your point—is that even in the greatest book of all time there are passages that are more and less worthwhile. The art of being a good reader is identifying the worthwhile and going over it slowly (maybe even rereading it) and identifying the less worthy and going over it quick.
The nice thing about spending more time with HTRAB is it forces you to think about reading. That’s a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.
https://x.com/paulg/status/2075980847228801132
There are also exercises which help develop short term memory like n-back training for which there are many phone apps.
Also doing something mindless helps. The dishes, the laundry, moderate exercise.
I can't pay attention to most audiobooks at 1x, I get bored between words.
I know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff
Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.
People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.
If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.
It's harder to modify what restaurants and online orders are available to you, but maybe you can work up to blocking or uninstalling those apps or something?
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over for Facebook over a decade ago:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook (read: your main social media) app on your phone; then
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps (read: all other social media) on your phone; next
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account.
But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been about a decade since I've cared to log into Facebook. Last time I tried, it felt like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox more than anything compelling.)
Not in a religious way, just have a no screens day every week, once a month, or just once.
You can get by one day without texting, looking for directions, getting an answer from google, ordering takeout, etc. etc. etc. Set yourself a boundary, no phones unless there's a fire or somebody needs to go to the hospital and stick to it. Make a schedule.
Edit - via the visual boost of short form video
No. Of course not. Someone who can't read due to mental disability isn't morally inferior to someone who can and does.
Sure. I'm answering it by another measure. Killing is, ceteris paribus, morally inferior to not killing. I'd argue a psychopath is henceforth morally debilitated despite it not really being their "fault" that they're born without empathy. This, in turn, helps me conclude that a murderer is, in fact, doing wrong.
Same here. Someone who can't read isn't inherently less morally capable than someone who can. What reading gives one is the capacity to gain a better understanding of ethics and morals. So I'd guess folks who read books are, on average, more intelligent and at least seeking to conduct themselves in a more moral fashion than someone who doesn't. But that doesn't make spending time reading morally superior to some other activity.
it's my personal hot-take, but I think that a majority of those background listeners are doing performative "learning" and aren't learning anything really. It's just to brag once a year that they have "read" 100+ books in a year and post a wall of covers or a number on their social network feed.
Basically, books aren't morally superior media than anything else really. But focused and monopoly attention dedicated to some media is morally superior to a performative background "learning". Books simply eliminate even a possibility of reading them in background.