We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort.
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done.
It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.
This sort of analysis can help find a healthy level of gaming or computer use. I spent hours reading Microsoft’s offline encyclopedia on the family PC, and playing games like Age of Empires which taught me history on the side.
Take control of what your kids play, and you can help them find more beneficial uses of electronics which is not an endless loop of bite sized low quality entertainment! :)
I think the internet is the real problem. Infinite choices, and sites designed specificly to keep you hooked. I feel like addictivity falls a lot when you are stuck with just offline things.
I don't know how old your kids are and if they play video games with friends, so maybe they're too young for this to begin with.
Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).
It's not even just kids, this is true for all people to be honest. Not saying we should go back to an agrarian society but maybe unrestricted access to dopamine slot machines isn't a good idea for your brain.
I had a really effective inoculation against the Skinner box 20+ years ago, when I became addicted to an MMO. It took my life utterly turning to shit and barely escaping being kicked out of university for me to wake up.
Since, I’ve always been aware of and wary of the possibility of this kind of dopamine cycling.
I see it in others. My wife discovered YouTube shorts a year or so ago, and now she’ll lose entire days to watching 20 second clips of reality TV.
Thing is, with a grown ass adult you can’t limit their screen time. You have to let them dig to the bottom of the pit all by themselves, and only when they ask for help to get out of it can you help - otherwise nothing is learned.
It’s honestly not at all dissimilar to friends who I’ve seen fuck their existences up with drugs. They’ve had to hit rock bottom before they quit - or they died. Can’t think of anyone who just went “actually, today I won’t have any heroin”.
I think drugs is an apt analogy. Hackernews is like alcohol, it definitely can be addicting but generally most people dont have a problem with it. Short form video is like meth
I was lucky(?) enough to have played enough RPG video games that had good stories and combat to be completely unimpressed with WoW when it came along. I got to level three or five or something, said to myself "Shit, this is boring." and never looked back.
That said, I put a ton of time into Guild Wars 2, so don't misinterpret this comment as me sneering at folks who did (or do) put a ton of time into WoW.
Absolutely. I was homeschooled growing up, and my parents were fairly strict about screentime. We read anything we could get our hands on, and I feel like I'm a happier, healthier adult today because of it.
While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.
The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.
You're on a screen right now. I like how all these parents decrying the evils of screentime dont think they should get off it themselves.
I watched Harvey price, a fairly famous autistic person in the UK edit his own video on an iPad, adding sounds etc. I think that's fantastic self directed learning and it came from, shock horror, a screen. I think this anti-screen sentiment is hysteria, plain and simple.
How old are the kids? Honestly two hours of screens and devices seems like a lot to me, so I'm surprised that's where you cut down to. How much were they using them before? But my kids are young, so it's probably different if you're talking about like teens or something.
Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for children?
Personally I also like the physics of a book a lot more for reading. Every book is a physically different object. You physically turn the page. You can physically see how far you are in the book. It's just all much less abstract and tangible.
You may have noticed the same behavioural issues amongst your adult friends or at times in yourself. I know I have. Anytime I give up doom scrolling for a week or two I feel instantly less anxious about the world and everything going on around me.
Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.
It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids. You see too many parents and grandparents buried on the phones. At least with boomers the tech adoption isnt as high
We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
> It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids.
It is the business model. There is an incentive to make games addictive.
Like arcade games the goal is to keep kids as much time on the machine as possible. But now the arcade is in your pocket 24/7.
Even worse, there is an incentive even to just open the app as it is an opportunity to show you an Ad. Notifications, and periodical rewards make sure that there is a constant need to interact with the phone.
Unregulated markets will always end up in scams and addiction. Because both are the fastest and more reliable way of getting money.
It's not just games though, it's pretty much every digital service now.
Virtually every website has infinite scrolling and algorithms that tailor the feed directly to what "appeals" to the user now. It's all just drip-feeding dopamine to the user base so they stay engaged for the longest possible time.
Kids do what parents do, and what parents allow them to do. Allowing X hours daily gaming/screens is already bad parenting (depending on age but we talk about kids here), like it or not ask psychologists. At the end its just same genes & upbringing from the same genes (or failure to do so and ie nanny picks up).
Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
I read an Economist article a few years ago that mentioned a literature professor at Columbia who said that most his undergrad freshmen students have never read a book cover to cover. Of those that have, their favorites were young adult fiction. Most of his students couldn't even focus on a single sonnet.
Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effectively illiterate. This just blows me away. I'm roughly your age and sometimes as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop, sunrise to sunset if I liked the book, and I knew a bunch of kids who would do the same thing. They weren't even what you'd call huge readers. It's just what you did if you were bored, or had an okay book with nothing else to do.
> as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop
Same! Our local library had a thing where you'd keep a list of all the books you read over the summer, and the week before school started you could turn the list in for a prize. I don't at all remember anything about the prizes, but I remember all the fun and joy I had reading the books and imagining other lives and worlds than my own.
Man, I literally never stopped as a kid - I always had a dogeared paperback on my person, in case a few spare minutes presented themselves to read.
And when I say “spare minutes” I mean… any time anyone wasn’t saying “put down that fucking book!” - I don’t know if the phenomenon of hiding a novel in a textbook and looking very very studious in class is even a thing any more.
These days I read almost exclusively on my phone, for much the same reason. If you flip open a paperback because you’re out for dinner and every other fucker isn’t talking but rather doomscrolling you look weird. If you give the appearance of also probably doing instragram or whatever, it’s socially acceptable.
Idk. I’m in my 40s now, I remember being mocked for being a bookworm when I was a kid, and I suppose this is just the same pattern - reading, knowing things, expanding your horizons - these things are not cool, and I don’t know if they ever were.
"Young adult" fiction is supposed to be for like 11-15 year olds. By high school I'd think you should be reading regular "adult" material. I think the curriculum generally agrees and assigns what we'd call adult literature in high school English.
Not only that. The strict adherence to things like ESRB ratings dumbs down today's kids.
I'm firmly in the camp that I am a better person today because things like parental controls did not really exist in the world when I was a kid, and I was playing GTA at like 10. While kids today at that age are forced to read, listen, watch or play dumbed down crap.
Young adult is NOT 11-15 year olds. By literally any definition.
> I think the curriculum generally agrees and assigns what we'd call adult literature in high school English.
The curriculum assigns what they should read to get overview of history of literature and general education. You are not meant to like most of it, you are meant to learn about the writer and period from it. The curriculum does not assigns what they "should" read for pleasure or like.
"Young adult" in this context is a publishing industry marketing tactic. It doesn't refer to actual adults. The target audience is mostly children who want to feel like they're getting away with something they're not supposed to.
Young adult literature is not "books for target range of 11-15". OP made that claim up to make it sound terrible that people who finished high school report liking to read books literally written for their age bracket. Official young adult age range is 13-18, which means literally high schoolers. And yes, they are already grown a lot, so those books frequently end up being popular among reading adults too.
I am from generation that read a lot. Huge bulk of what people, both adults and teenagers, read was something called "junk literature". It is fascinating how the "kids don't read for pleasure" panic instantly jumps into "it is horrible that when kids read for pleasure, they report liking books that are age appropriate and written so that their generation likes them".
It will rot your mind! It will make your eyes square! Stop doing something that I am not doing!
> "junk literature" ... fascinating ... panic
Yes. It's funny how old this meme is. It's about as old as novels, at least. It's fun reading centuries-old novels and finding references (well, thinly veiled protests) to the holier than thou impeccable paragons of virtue that have nothing better to do than hassle someone who wishes to read a book.
I suppose there's been some progress, if the fiction police have had to retreat to a limited subset of fiction to call sinful.
How did you travelled from "this is their favorite book" to "they dont find enjoyment in anything else"? That is absurd.
Second, why is it shocking that smart educated Ivy League student would enjoy a book written for the young adult category? They read manga, superhero comicd, they watch same series on TV. Are you similarly shocked they watch football and their favorite movie is not from 1959?
At the risk of a flamewar I want to say that I still don't accept audiobooks as a 100% drop in replacement for actually reading. I know a lot of millenials my age who insist that listening to an audiobook while <driving/cleaning/walking/biking/cooking> is completely the same as actually sitting down and focusing without distractions on a paper book for hours. But it isn't! Firstly, much is lost without seeing the formatting of the page, and without being able to flip back to an earlier page easily to re-read something. Secondly, sitting down and reading develops concentration and focus.
I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.
I agree with the sitting down and focusing part. For me, I've always been extremely inclined to audio processing, so I can sometimes just lay in bed or in a chair, or on the train, and... listen to an audio book. I really don't think it makes a big difference, at least for me. I used to be attached to the sensory experience of flicking pages, but there's also a big factor in letting the book (or, the narrator) take you to their own pace. A good narrator really completes a story.
All that stuff about listening to an audiobook while working out, or cooking, driving, or anything is crystallized bravado from people who think it makes them look clever that they can do two things badly at the same time.
I think reading develops internal monologue and you also can change the tempo according to understanding, slow down when a pasaage is hard etc. With audiobooks something that is not very clear escapes away as the audiobook moves on. Maybe multiple listenings can fill the gap but am not sure if re-listening to audiobooks is a thing.
You're right that a lot of material really does require a physical book. Anything even remotely technical.
That said, I would argue that a voice actor is far more significant than page formatting when it comes to novels. A good voice actor can turn a good story great, and sometimes a poor story to... acceptable.
I've read thousands of novels over the decades, both with and without audio, so I'm reasonably confident about the above.
> Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.
I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.
Projectors and electronic whiteboards elevated lessons for me. Ever see a science teacher try to draw a galaxy or nebula on a blackboard, and try to describe the awesomeness of it using just words?
Math concepts, especially visualizations, become so much more accessible.
One math teacher in my school used an analog overhead projector as part of his workflow: he would write math on a long transparency roll, sitting at his desk, facing the class, so every student could see exactly how their work should be reasoned-about and laid out properly. He could rewind (literally) to any previous point in the lesson.
As always, it comes down to one's ability to use the tools effectively.
FOMO at its best, fuck their personalities and development and having happy childhood as base layer of personality for rest of their lives, its grades at all costs!
Famously most of asian kids wear glasses from studying all the time, well we need up up that up! What if they overtake us in some rat race. Not the best parenting but some folks are like that and then it shows on kids, thats true.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
Reading/writing is a much more dense and navigable way of taking in and recording information than speech. Efficient use of AI requires being very good at reading quickly and having the comprehension skills to pick up on nuances that suggest a hole in the AI's work.
In a world where AI is empowering existing experts while risking junior hiring, the young should be aiming to be competitive with those experts, not aiming below even current juniors. If, as a human, you're just acting as a glorified harness around an LLM, you're more replaceable.
In my opinion it is. Reading can convey information faster than even sped up videos, is easier to skim, and has high precision.
Im not saying it is the best for everyone, but it has been proven repeatedly to beat out any other method in the majority of the population. Plus its time stability and storage is much easier and reliable.
It also could have other side benefits like focus or perhaps something like visual acuity, much like how writing by hand can develop good hand-eye coordination. If someone struggled to write with a pencil for example I would be very wary about handing them sharp tools or knives.
Reading, writing, and math are foundational skills that, aside from having enormous utility in their own right, are also crucial for developing sharp, creative, and analytical minds.
Take writing as an example: it challenges you to organize your thoughts, patch up the weaknesses of your arguments, and find effective means of connecting with your audience. In so doing, you restructure your own understanding of the world, deepening your expertise and mental schemas. That's something an LLM can't do.
When I used to read for pleasure, I did it because it was pleasurable. Not because it would be the hard thing. It was fun and easy.
What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".
This is conflating hard with unpleasant. A child just learning to read is going to find it hard to do, yet through adults pushing them to do the hard thing, they learn to read and sometimes begin to find it to be pleasurable. Building most skills is hard, yet that doesn't exclude taking pleasure in it. Many of us taught ourselves to code, the fact that we enjoyed it doesn't mean it wasn't also hard.
We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.
I don't think this is accurate. In basically every single game or sport with measurable outcomes, doing things are relatively simple to you (and often enjoyable) endlessly - drives improvement.
If you want to make the argument that it's muscle memory in e.g. shooting freethrows in basketball, then you can see the exact same thing in doing chess tactical puzzles. There's even one successful learning method called the Woodpecker Method where you endlessly repeat over the same series of tactics working to get the time it takes you to do them down to essentially instantaneous. And it works excellently for improvement, and I obviously don't just mean improvement at doing that set of tactics.
The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived but not all of them.
I might be missing some other reasons why this could be happening, like increases in game balance and coordination.
Play Mario Odyssey for an hour or two then play Super Mario Bros 1, 2, or 3 as one startling example.
Mario games have reduced the difficulty a lot, although you should probably compare Mario Wonder with SMB 1-3. Odyssey is more comparable with Mario 64.
One of the things though is when most peopley play SMB 1-3 today, they're playing with input lag. Mario Wonder was designed with input lag in mind, SMB 1 was not and it increases the difficulty.
Mario Wonder lets you choose to use invulnerable characters, etc. There was only one level I remember needing to try many times to beat. OTOH, there's lots of difficult levels in smb 1...
That's mostly the MBAification of games that I think is completely disconnected from what most kids want. But the MBA logic is about maximizing market reach. Relatively few people will choose not to play a game because it's too easy, but ostensibly the same isn't true of games that are seen as difficult. Of course Elden Ring, Dark Souls, et al completely proved this to be nonsense (to say nothing of pvp games), but who's gonna let a bit of reality get in the way of pie charts, bar graphs, and powerpoints?
In the world of games outside the big money AAA MBA stuff, there's plenty of highly challenging franchises that maintain true to themselves and thrive, even with plenty of kids playing. E.g. - I suspect the median age for Binding of Isaac is well below the age of consent.
Shifting to a position below where it previously was? I don't get your point... Is there's a new bar? What would you say the new expectation is that doesn't build on previous core skills?
I think a world where people are just automatons who ask AIs to do things for them is a pretty bleak world.
Reading, writing, being able to focus on things... these are healthy things that healthy brains do. And I don't think that's just a case of it always being that way in the past, so any change to that is bad. I think humans as a species will die if we give this sort of thing up, and I don't think I'm exaggerating or engaging in AI doomerism here.
Not to mention that AI isn't that good. Maybe it will be, but I'm skeptical. Human progress will basically stop if we lose a generation of kids to this brainrot, with barely-capable AIs that can't even design their successors and move humanity forward. Who else will push humanity forward, if the next several generations of kids are intellectually incapable of doing so?
What kind of world are we building where advanced technology is just used to stop living as full human beings? Where’s the desire to self-actualize? Did it start dying when people got glued to the idiot box?
I am not sure what to make of this devils advocate comment. Are you just throwing opposites at the wall? I genuinely don't know how to interpret the query about attention span?
Are you suggesting that a lower attention span has no impact? I don't know how I would learn things if my attention span was shit, or even sit with difficult problems or emotions and resolve them. Even just general productivity, which, sure there are some arguments about good vs bad productivity, but in general, any form of productivity will benefit from better attention span I think?
My pen weighs in at 10g in my backpack and is capable of durably recording information for thousands of years. No battery to charge, cheap, and plentiful.
I use my fingers to interact with computers, and they don't have any extra weight at all, as they are already attached to me. You need to also count the weight of the paper.
And, no, your pen and paper are not able to durably record information for thousands of years. Unless you have some really bespoke setup.
Acid-free paper and a carbon-black ink, or a modern neutral pH iron-gall ink, should last 1000 years if stored correctly. 2000 might be pushing it, but under a controlled atmosphere it should be possible.
At the Montessori school my kid goes to, children read a lot. They have access to the Library, can ask the teacher to go there when they need/want to. The school has a no phone policy, children are not allowed to bring them to school. Computers are only in the computer room for children to access when they want to do research and there are no laptops in the class room.
It works well and the children are both happy and do well academically
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
Apologies friend, neighbor comment has it right. Not trying to shade anyone with ADHD, just calling out as a widespread/modern challenge. Same with poor reading skills. Parents, schools, and culture have failed many people, who might otherwise have been avid readers, but instead they don't even know the joy of reading a good book.
I didn't read it that way, I thought the GP was listing it as one of the newer challenges to getting kids (and adults!) to read. IMO it doesn't prevent you from loving to read, but it does make it harder.
You misunderstand how it works. It's not "can't pay attention" like people think. It's "have difficultly directing attention". There's two different failure modes. One is "not interesting enough, so can't keep my attention focused on it" and the other is "too interesting, so can't take my attention off it". You'll find ADHDers that like reading probably read a lot.
One part of ADHD is hyperfocus. ADHD is a dopamine deficiency issue, so when something highly stimulating (like a good book, or writing code) causes a release of dopamine the brain locks onto it and won't let go.
I knew a friend with ADHD that had a hard time reading. I suggested to him that he visualize and draw an image of everything he’s reading in his mind and apparently that made that a lot easier.
Um, were they not visualizing books as they read them? I'm assuming fiction like novels. How could one possibly read a novel and not visualize everything they're reading?
Oh have I got a treat for you! The ability to make the magic pictures appear in your mind is not actually a universal human experience. There's a broad range of related topics, but the place to start is probably 'Aphantasia'[0].
It's quite interesting to talk about with friends and compare experiences. Good if you're all comfortable enough to allow a little bit of "treating the witness as hostile".
Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
Funnily enough, smart phones (and previous feature phones with their SMS) have probably gotten more people into reading and writing for leisure than any other technology since the printing press.
Granted, people are not doing any long form reading and writing on these devices, but they are reading and writing.
I disagree, people used to read newspapers and magazines. Even if you were not an intellectual or interested in politics you'd read the sports daily, or the gossip column.
For a brief period before instagrams and youtube became mainstream and tiktoks came along to decimate whatever was left.
This is an exaggeration, but I wouldn't rule out your average smartphone user reading less in an average commute than they would do just reading store signs as they pass...
For what it’s worth I think people have always been this way. I used to read during recess when I was in middle school. I usually could not wait to get back to my books. But the other kids saw this as profoundly antisocial. I wasn’t being antisocial exactly; I was pretty shy and had a very active imagination. Amusingly, the school bullies misinterpreted my bookishness as weakness. That changed when I (accidentally) knocked out a kid’s front teeth during a fight. I felt terrible about it but the bullying stopped immediately.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
Similarly, people are socially allowed to be buried in their phones while at work and this doesn't get critized by managers much, but god help you if you had a magazine or book open when taking a short break.
There were many performative hot takes at the time. The best part though, for me, was coach Nick Sirianni defending him when asked about it after the game. Sirianni said:
> Some guys pray in between, some guys mediate in between. A.J. reads in between. Whatever these guys need to do to put their mind in a place where they can play with great detail and great effort, I fully encourage them to do that
I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the background - it’s explicit and relevant to the story (which has spawned a counter-culture of writers).
My apologies for over-commenting in this page but, uh, is there a way to read without reading the words? WTF does "I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes." mean? Are people reading with their eyes closed or using braille or listening to the paper or something?
It always has been negative attention gathering - reading marks you as a nerd.
And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.
It's not about the reading. It's about: a) being different, and b) making them feel guilty for not reading themselves. I used to get the same for being vegetarian, for much the same reasons. These days it's less weird and, oddly, I feel like people are almost envious that I get to have a "cool" label and they don't. It's strange because it's quite easy to get the label yourself if you want it, but it's hard to change habits.
I read a lot too, but it’s somewhere around 50 a year. How on earth are you getting through two books a week? What sort of books are these? I confess I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy that are between 500 and 800 pages each. That’s not all of my reading, but I’d say at least 50% is.
On vacation, for example, I'll read 1-2 books a day. I would say most books I read are in the 300-350p range; just because that's what most books are, it seems.
Well it’s just cope. It’s the same way in the UK where drinkers will sneer at non drinkers, or meat eaters at vegans. You will get criticised for losing weight or making dietary changes. People imagine that someone else may feel superior to them for making better choices, and they absolutely hate this.
Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional.
Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.
However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.
I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.
Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.
I remember when Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Mix of 'Choose your own adventure' and solo D+D adventure) were big in the UK in the 80s, and teachers were sniffy about them not being proper reading. I bet they'd love their kids to be reading them now.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
Is libby very popular among young school children? Based on surveys asking how often kids read per week I would figure ebook reading is also down. They don't usually ask about the format.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.
My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.
Isn't this the problem though, books are no longer attractive with all the other options? How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?
I think the content of many books is much cooler than the crap on my timelines. There’s just higher entropy (or activation energy?) to get the book picked up and opened vs the serotonin lever in our pockets.
I’ve just strived to read like hell to my kids and make reading one of their most fun things around. Pretty much all we read is stuff they like, even if I hate it (I’m looking at you, Pokemon novels). If they like an author (in our house we love Daniel Pinkwater) I will go out of my way to find that authors books.
We write to authors, we talk about what we read (somehow I serialised a retelling of Killing Commendatore), my 8 yo listens to my audiobooks in the car with me, we are frickin bookworms.
And of course they still play Minecraft and animal crossing. It’s just that picking up a book is one of their default go-tos, and I think that’s enough. They’re building the habit and the understanding of what reading is about, and if we keep that up they will be ok.
> How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?
You don't need to pretend it didn't exist, you need to legislate and ensure that access to it is cut off uniformly for developing minds. We already see the emergence of this kind of legislation with Australia enforcing a ban for social media under 16s; and other countries in the process of legislating ones.
I happen to favor this approach because "pretend it doesn't exist" strategy doesn't work for addictive things that are left lying around the house for kids to access. If society in general can prevent children from getting access to alcohol before 21, there's no particular reason the same can't be done for addictive "social" media algorithms.
We can’t, it’s simply too addictive in comparison. It produces more dopamine, more quickly and consistently and there’s no way books will ever compete. Really it’s not even technology that is the problem, it’s specifically just algorithmic driven social media. We have to actively avoid the addictive algorithms and it’s really difficult.
It's not necessarily that simple. Both I and my wife read, almost every week I read my daughter passages I've come across in my books, we have bookshelves in every room. We read to our younger children and they enjoy being read to.
I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.
Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.
FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.
My wife is a school librarian and really dislikes graphic novels, in part because they are so expensive they eat all of her meager budget. But she recognizes they can be the hook that catches a future reader. Not always, but sometimes she can get a kid to transition to full books from graphic novels, so they do have their place. They seem very useful with her significant ESL population.
I logged in especially to second what lukewrites has said.
My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.
My son is in this transition phase right now. There are some of these "dumb" series which offer books ranging from mostly-image-some-text, some-images-some-text to text. The prose offerings are a great on/off ramp, since he knows the characters and conventions. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this trajectory and really don't even care how dumb, simple, whatever these books may be: my son is reading grade levels ahead of the rest of his class and these books have been a major contributor to his success.
My first daughter I managed to flip the switch for reading through Tintin and other graphic novels. My younger daughter skipped that entirely. She started reading later than the first, but jumped right in to longer full length books that were captivating for her (they were series she had seen her sister read).
I completely agree that we can encourage but reading needs to come naturally to them. You can't force-feed curiosity and passion, which is what reading is all about for young people.
I was going to mention this as well. Everything is a graphic novel these days. Go to the bookstore, and at least half of the shelf space dedicated to children is for graphic novels (and that doesn’t include the manga section). Almost every book series has a graphic novel version. And some of these are just complete skip. Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants from my days, now DogMan and others) just pumps out the most low effort stuff imaginable.
It’s no surprise kids are reading way behind what previous generations did when this is what they are bombarded with.
Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.
Nor do they have books in the house. It's a great time to be a book lover because you can accumulate a huge library for next to nothing by harvesting all the stuff people are giving away. But you can go into a house with children these days and see not a single book in sight. It's sad.
I'm definitely on the "it's the devices" train, but reading instruction in school in the US after high school really breaks students into an absolute exhaustion with the practice. Not to mention they're still reading the stuff I read in the '80s. Certainly some exceptions but I do not think secondary instruction has the right take on this.
Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.
Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.
1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.
2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".
3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.
4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.
5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.
Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.
The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated from high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between being forced to read books/topics at school I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
The research shows sharpest declines at 13 years. We have a lot of infrastructure to support young readers. But not the the older readers.
It’s not just screens.
Teenagers are overscheduled compared to years past. My son’s purpose in high school seems to be to build a resume for a future college. OTOH I got into a decent college with mediocre grades and not even trying.
He reads a lot - but it’s assigned reading.
So nerdy, smart kids like my son get taken out of the reading for fun group. Exactly the kinds of kids that would have been reading casually in decades past.
It means we’re moving back to peasant strata that do the most menial jobs and live in ghettos. Kids that can read will be in charge, mostly managing functional idiots who can’t even watch an entire TikTok short. It will be a huge underclass that will be too dumb to riot.
Idk, since letting my son stay up as late as he wants reading trips to the library have been weekly, even as he transitions to actual no image chapter books. As others have said we try to time box tech best we can. I may have to physically lift him from the bed some days but it is worth it to find him passed out with a book in his hand at 10pm.
I'm dyslexic and find reading genuinely taxing — my imagination moves faster than I can read, I lose the thread, and I've never enjoyed it. The last book I read for pleasure was when I was fifteen. I don't feel like I'm missing something.
But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.
He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.
I read a lot of books when I was younger, but I also read a lot of magazines. They gave me something light in between books. Now devices have replaced magazines and they suck you in.
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
PISA does not measure reading for pleasure, it measures reading for factual information. There are questions about reading graphs, figuring out information only indirectly mentioned, that sort of thing. It does not care whether you get emotionally invested in this or that character or story.
Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.
I don't mean to put this report down -- it's a good thing to monitor and report on. I'm glad someone is paying attention.
And how are the parents/adults doing?
It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.
While this is probably bad, reading gets more credit than it should, especially when it gets to reading junk content, not engaging with the content, and escapism. A baseline level of reading is important, but beyond that, I'd rather kids go out and do things than just read about them.
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more.
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
In high school I was at a friend’s house. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books I loved and the other half with books I’d never heard of! I felt like a prospector striking gold :) Cool to think that we have something similar on demand now!
Same, mainstream book sites are a bit broken when it comes to surfacing anything outside the one size fits all notion of "best sellers". I rarely care about best sellers. Bland thrillers, chick lit, etc. Not my thing. And the whole all recommendations converge on Harry Potter as the best thing ever is a bit lame at this point.
LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.
I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons is great. It may also be nice to recommend books that have movie or streaming series to them. Books are most of the time better than the movie as your own fantasy and imagination just makes it so. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a good example.
I read the Wheel of Time series. It's all I read. It took about 18 months. It's great, though. I'm sad it's over, and I'm going to miss the characters.
Presently surprised by the lack of /lit/ meme recommendations like “infinite jest” or “gravities rainbow”.
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
Realistically speaking, I also think of this as a kind of evolutionary process. It is about obtaining necessary information within the flood of information. I do think the amount of reading is important, but I also wonder whether unconditionally suppressing dopamine is the right approach. Wouldn't we become more vulnerable if we were raised in a sterile environment?
It is not that books are a sterile environment. Rather, I think the very attempt to isolate someone in an internet environment is itself a kind of sterile environment. To be honest, I think it is now difficult to get all information from books alone. I like reading too, but reading ultimately has a point where it becomes fixed at a particular moment. Do books from the 2010s align with theories from the 2020s? I don't think so. There is no need to know every trending theory, but conversely, I question whether we should be immersed only in books. Since the way we obtain information has fundamentally changed, I wonder whether reading must necessarily remain a hobby
I think the advantage of books is clear. A book has a logical beginning, development, turn, and conclusion all contained within one volume. In other words, you can learn that format itself, the method of logical exposition. But upon reflection, that is just a form, not the very essence of logical speaking. I certainly agree that books have formal advantages, but I don't think those are unique to books. Rather, the biggest drawback of books is that their form is fixed at a particular point in time. Critical thinking is not developed through books alone, and frankly, not all books are that good in terms of content either.
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
This isn’t a bad thing? Kids nowadays have the attention span of puppies. It’s been shown extensively that doomscrolling, switching context every 30s isn’t good for the brain.
Perhaps the research is wrong though because our way of thinking has been "slow, controlled, non intensive".
Now that technology CAN give us content at faster speeds, isn't it better for the brains to change to adapt to the short form cycles? Otherwise you'll be left behind stuck on topic one when the new generation have absorbed 1, 2, 3, 4. etc.
Books were already losing the fight on road trips once the gameboy came out - I can't imagine what having every movie, tv show, and song in a flashing touchscreen connected to the internet, why would I pick up a book that takes so much work to deliver fun when I can play AstroBlasters and watch tiktoks of war crimes
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.
Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.
I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.
Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.
I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
The release of the Xbox coincided with what I viewed as a big jump in video game players. Even the biggest athletic jocks played a ton of Halo. And then not long after that saw much older people start playing games like CoD:MW as after work entertainment instead of just tv.
The mayan calendar ended/started a new. So apparently the doomsday did happen, we just did not really notice while being distracted with our new gadgets ...
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
I'm pessimistic about the future. We stopped reading, we are outsourcing thinking to LLM assistants, and we put the dumbest people possible in charge of running the country. I don't see how this could possibly end well.
And big pictures. Oh wait, I think those are called comics. And the really short ones are children picture books. You know, because small children don't have the concentration to focus on longer stories.
I read to my two kids every day until they were 13-14 years old. They loved books. Every car ride was an opportunity to listen to an audiobook. The kids loved to write and make arts and crafts as well.
During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.
After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.
When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.
Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.
If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.
Am I the only old-head who hates video explanations when what I wanted was something I could read? I hate searching for information in the web and the only relevant results are videos, of course with ads at the front.
You are not.
It's infuriating to the point I've used Gemini to make a readable summary of a video, which works pretty well since they have better access to all the video data/metadata than OpenAI/Anthropic.
So ... kids did read more in a time the single most influential kids book series was popular as compared to today? Surprise.
Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.
The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮
(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.
I wonder what is it that makes reading so good but all the other forms of information transmission since then seem to have a somewhat negative effect on overall learning and well-being.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
When I first got a portable computer I basically immediately stopped reading. Like twelve years back. It only got worse when I got sufficient smart phone. I read basically daily before.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
This is why I prefer audibooks piped through my whole house sonos. It allows me to consume long form while walking around the house completing various projects. Reading isn't a chore, but the thing I engage in while doing chores.
I can empathize with the commenter you're replying to. I still read for pleasure and have to read constantly for work of course. On some days, I feel like I can't. It is like exercising the same muscle every day which will lead to injury in a short amount of time. Switching to audiobooks or just taking a break does resolve that.
From what I am seeing around me though, reading for pleasure or even to gain knowledge has decreased a lot. I noticed it in adults first and this is being reflected in their children.
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
Quality of what's produced in that medium might be one thing. People reading for pleasure are usually reading works published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality. Sure, it might be "trashy" novels relative to literature, but at least there's a floor to the quality level or else it just doesn't get published.
But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.
> published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality
You can say the same for movies and tv if you filter by IMDB score (which i do). Heck even podcasts get millions of views before I ever hear about them.
Similarly, I listen to a lot of podcasts, but whenever I listen to The Guardian Long Reads (read articles) I’m kinda surprised every time how much higher quality they are than typical podcasts, since they’re based on well written articles.
Because it is exercise for the imaginative mind. Reading can force a reader to build worlds. Some readers are good at this, others need practice. To call reading “consumptive” is severely minimizing literature’s impact on communication throughout human history.
Even looking back at my mother reading Stephen King and romance novels … her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.
Note: this comment written from the bathtub after putting down “The Stand” by Stephen King, you know, one of those “little value” books.
Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to. And while there are works that are better and worse, no matter how lowly the thing is that is being read, that growth still accrues. You could have a child who read nothing but cereal boxes and truck stop restroom graffiti, and he'll be ahead of his classmates on every single thing you can score.
It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
My personal assumption has been that 'pleasure', at least partially, includes expected practical returns. I'd also guess that's at least partially true for kids: "my parents told me if I read a lot, I'll be smart when I grow up", etc.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
Listening to podcast is not easier then reading. It requires constant attention and does not really allow you to take a break without loosing on. In a lot of ways it is harder and more tiresome. You are free to do some other easy thing while doing it, it can be more engaging due to voices and sounds, but it does not take less effort then reading.
I suppose this varies depending on what type of material is covered in the podcast. We typically assume it contains surface-level content, as their primary purpose is entertainment, but the answer would probably change if we were talking about a lecture.
Fair enough :-) Do you have a theory for why we view reading, even in terms of pleasure, as favorable? I imagine it's because we see some utility in it over other activities.
I think writing is needed to learn how to organize and express complex chains of thoughts. And to learn how to write well, you need to know how to read critically, too. It goes hand in hand. The same skills you apply to the words of others you can apply to your own, if you have them.
I used to read a ton of fiction as a kid, and continued into my late 30s. My reading for pleasure has dropped precipitously of late though, in large part because it gives less dopamine than other things I can do that also make the "productivity" centers of my brain light up. I still read a lot, but it's skewed towards geopolitics, economics and analyses, and most if it is short-form.
imho its the screen vs no screen that is the problem. Its better to have one thing for a task . for example one notebook one alarm one instrument one book etc. Our brain aint made to have so many thing cramped in one device. I think when i open a screen my brain sees all the functions of the device and cant focus well. But if I read a book my brain knowes this is the book about this and that and nothing else.
We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort.
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done.
It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.
This sort of analysis can help find a healthy level of gaming or computer use. I spent hours reading Microsoft’s offline encyclopedia on the family PC, and playing games like Age of Empires which taught me history on the side.
Take control of what your kids play, and you can help them find more beneficial uses of electronics which is not an endless loop of bite sized low quality entertainment! :)
I think the internet is the real problem. Infinite choices, and sites designed specificly to keep you hooked. I feel like addictivity falls a lot when you are stuck with just offline things.
I don't know how old your kids are and if they play video games with friends, so maybe they're too young for this to begin with.
Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).
It's not even just kids, this is true for all people to be honest. Not saying we should go back to an agrarian society but maybe unrestricted access to dopamine slot machines isn't a good idea for your brain.
I had a really effective inoculation against the Skinner box 20+ years ago, when I became addicted to an MMO. It took my life utterly turning to shit and barely escaping being kicked out of university for me to wake up.
Since, I’ve always been aware of and wary of the possibility of this kind of dopamine cycling.
I see it in others. My wife discovered YouTube shorts a year or so ago, and now she’ll lose entire days to watching 20 second clips of reality TV.
Thing is, with a grown ass adult you can’t limit their screen time. You have to let them dig to the bottom of the pit all by themselves, and only when they ask for help to get out of it can you help - otherwise nothing is learned.
It’s honestly not at all dissimilar to friends who I’ve seen fuck their existences up with drugs. They’ve had to hit rock bottom before they quit - or they died. Can’t think of anyone who just went “actually, today I won’t have any heroin”.
Yet you're still sat writing mini essays to strangers because of the dopamine hit....
I think drugs is an apt analogy. Hackernews is like alcohol, it definitely can be addicting but generally most people dont have a problem with it. Short form video is like meth
20 years ago? Aahh, good old World of Warcraft is my guess. Played far too much far too long myself.
> World of Warcraft
I was lucky(?) enough to have played enough RPG video games that had good stories and combat to be completely unimpressed with WoW when it came along. I got to level three or five or something, said to myself "Shit, this is boring." and never looked back.
That said, I put a ton of time into Guild Wars 2, so don't misinterpret this comment as me sneering at folks who did (or do) put a ton of time into WoW.
https://www.alibaba.com/signal-jammer-suppliers.html
Yes, yes you can..
Feds will shoot your dog for that.
And the exact same people complaining about the screens and saying that something must be done will cheer because "we live in a society" or whatever.
This is why i have an xbox and not a gaming pc. Can't have a crack dealer in the house.
you don’t need a crack dealer when you are providing heroin and a needle
Absolutely. I was homeschooled growing up, and my parents were fairly strict about screentime. We read anything we could get our hands on, and I feel like I'm a happier, healthier adult today because of it.
While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.
The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.
You're on a screen right now. I like how all these parents decrying the evils of screentime dont think they should get off it themselves.
I watched Harvey price, a fairly famous autistic person in the UK edit his own video on an iPad, adding sounds etc. I think that's fantastic self directed learning and it came from, shock horror, a screen. I think this anti-screen sentiment is hysteria, plain and simple.
How old are the kids? Honestly two hours of screens and devices seems like a lot to me, so I'm surprised that's where you cut down to. How much were they using them before? But my kids are young, so it's probably different if you're talking about like teens or something.
Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for children?
They didn't write how old the kids were, there's a big difference between a 3 year old and a 12 year old.
> It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
That anyone is pretending otherwise is mind boggling to me.
It’s devices but also parents. If parents don’t read books everyday, kids won’t either.
Why can't you read from a screen instead? Why do all the benefits of reading seemingly disappear when read from a display screen?
Most screens have distractions just one tap away.
Personally I also like the physics of a book a lot more for reading. Every book is a physically different object. You physically turn the page. You can physically see how far you are in the book. It's just all much less abstract and tangible.
It’s a different experience but E-readers come close. Screens’ UIs are too interactive for a proper lecture.
every screen, even the majority of e-readers, now has advertising, which is designed to distract and incept.
You may have noticed the same behavioural issues amongst your adult friends or at times in yourself. I know I have. Anytime I give up doom scrolling for a week or two I feel instantly less anxious about the world and everything going on around me.
Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.
> Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come.
Not only will it not, autism will not last more than 25 years in it's current form. I bet money on both of those
Thanks for your input, I find this take intriguing. Could you elaborate on the link you see between social media and Autism?
It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids. You see too many parents and grandparents buried on the phones. At least with boomers the tech adoption isnt as high
We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
> It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids.
It is the business model. There is an incentive to make games addictive. Like arcade games the goal is to keep kids as much time on the machine as possible. But now the arcade is in your pocket 24/7.
Even worse, there is an incentive even to just open the app as it is an opportunity to show you an Ad. Notifications, and periodical rewards make sure that there is a constant need to interact with the phone.
Unregulated markets will always end up in scams and addiction. Because both are the fastest and more reliable way of getting money.
> There is an incentive to make games addictive.
It's not just games though, it's pretty much every digital service now.
Virtually every website has infinite scrolling and algorithms that tailor the feed directly to what "appeals" to the user now. It's all just drip-feeding dopamine to the user base so they stay engaged for the longest possible time.
Yes. The hardest part about telling my kid to get off his device is setting a good example by getting off mine.
Kids do what parents do, and what parents allow them to do. Allowing X hours daily gaming/screens is already bad parenting (depending on age but we talk about kids here), like it or not ask psychologists. At the end its just same genes & upbringing from the same genes (or failure to do so and ie nanny picks up).
Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.
There are kids with autism and ADHD that you may have not considered.
> asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes
They sound deprived, why haven't you got them a bike if you're complaining about screen time?
> It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
You sound like you're convincing yourself here.
It's worse than this.
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
I read an Economist article a few years ago that mentioned a literature professor at Columbia who said that most his undergrad freshmen students have never read a book cover to cover. Of those that have, their favorites were young adult fiction. Most of his students couldn't even focus on a single sonnet.
Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effectively illiterate. This just blows me away. I'm roughly your age and sometimes as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop, sunrise to sunset if I liked the book, and I knew a bunch of kids who would do the same thing. They weren't even what you'd call huge readers. It's just what you did if you were bored, or had an okay book with nothing else to do.
> as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop
Same! Our local library had a thing where you'd keep a list of all the books you read over the summer, and the week before school started you could turn the list in for a prize. I don't at all remember anything about the prizes, but I remember all the fun and joy I had reading the books and imagining other lives and worlds than my own.
Man, I literally never stopped as a kid - I always had a dogeared paperback on my person, in case a few spare minutes presented themselves to read.
And when I say “spare minutes” I mean… any time anyone wasn’t saying “put down that fucking book!” - I don’t know if the phenomenon of hiding a novel in a textbook and looking very very studious in class is even a thing any more.
These days I read almost exclusively on my phone, for much the same reason. If you flip open a paperback because you’re out for dinner and every other fucker isn’t talking but rather doomscrolling you look weird. If you give the appearance of also probably doing instragram or whatever, it’s socially acceptable.
Idk. I’m in my 40s now, I remember being mocked for being a bookworm when I was a kid, and I suppose this is just the same pattern - reading, knowing things, expanding your horizons - these things are not cool, and I don’t know if they ever were.
Young adult fiction being the fing young adults read the most makes 100% sense.
"Young adult" fiction is supposed to be for like 11-15 year olds. By high school I'd think you should be reading regular "adult" material. I think the curriculum generally agrees and assigns what we'd call adult literature in high school English.
Not only that. The strict adherence to things like ESRB ratings dumbs down today's kids.
I'm firmly in the camp that I am a better person today because things like parental controls did not really exist in the world when I was a kid, and I was playing GTA at like 10. While kids today at that age are forced to read, listen, watch or play dumbed down crap.
Young adult is NOT 11-15 year olds. By literally any definition.
> I think the curriculum generally agrees and assigns what we'd call adult literature in high school English.
The curriculum assigns what they should read to get overview of history of literature and general education. You are not meant to like most of it, you are meant to learn about the writer and period from it. The curriculum does not assigns what they "should" read for pleasure or like.
"Young adult" in this context is a publishing industry marketing tactic. It doesn't refer to actual adults. The target audience is mostly children who want to feel like they're getting away with something they're not supposed to.
If by 'publishing industry marketing tactic' you mean a demographic, age range and to some extent (you can argue with this one) a genre, sure.
It doesn't refer to "actual adults", no: The age range is usually said to be 13..18.
The target audience is largely teenagers who want to read what they want to read.
What's your problem with "kids" reading books, anyway?
Young adult literature is not "books for target range of 11-15". OP made that claim up to make it sound terrible that people who finished high school report liking to read books literally written for their age bracket. Official young adult age range is 13-18, which means literally high schoolers. And yes, they are already grown a lot, so those books frequently end up being popular among reading adults too.
I am from generation that read a lot. Huge bulk of what people, both adults and teenagers, read was something called "junk literature". It is fascinating how the "kids don't read for pleasure" panic instantly jumps into "it is horrible that when kids read for pleasure, they report liking books that are age appropriate and written so that their generation likes them".
It will rot your mind! It will make your eyes square! Stop doing something that I am not doing!
> "junk literature" ... fascinating ... panic
Yes. It's funny how old this meme is. It's about as old as novels, at least. It's fun reading centuries-old novels and finding references (well, thinly veiled protests) to the holier than thou impeccable paragons of virtue that have nothing better to do than hassle someone who wishes to read a book.
I suppose there's been some progress, if the fiction police have had to retreat to a limited subset of fiction to call sinful.
If you are a student at any Ivy League, I expect you to have read and, yes, found enjoyment in something more weighty than YA Lit.
How did you travelled from "this is their favorite book" to "they dont find enjoyment in anything else"? That is absurd.
Second, why is it shocking that smart educated Ivy League student would enjoy a book written for the young adult category? They read manga, superhero comicd, they watch same series on TV. Are you similarly shocked they watch football and their favorite movie is not from 1959?
"[as they grow up] these covid kids are gonna move like a wave through everything that requires literacy"
-some teacher from Brooklyn that I know
At the risk of a flamewar I want to say that I still don't accept audiobooks as a 100% drop in replacement for actually reading. I know a lot of millenials my age who insist that listening to an audiobook while <driving/cleaning/walking/biking/cooking> is completely the same as actually sitting down and focusing without distractions on a paper book for hours. But it isn't! Firstly, much is lost without seeing the formatting of the page, and without being able to flip back to an earlier page easily to re-read something. Secondly, sitting down and reading develops concentration and focus.
I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.
I agree with the sitting down and focusing part. For me, I've always been extremely inclined to audio processing, so I can sometimes just lay in bed or in a chair, or on the train, and... listen to an audio book. I really don't think it makes a big difference, at least for me. I used to be attached to the sensory experience of flicking pages, but there's also a big factor in letting the book (or, the narrator) take you to their own pace. A good narrator really completes a story.
All that stuff about listening to an audiobook while working out, or cooking, driving, or anything is crystallized bravado from people who think it makes them look clever that they can do two things badly at the same time.
I think reading develops internal monologue and you also can change the tempo according to understanding, slow down when a pasaage is hard etc. With audiobooks something that is not very clear escapes away as the audiobook moves on. Maybe multiple listenings can fill the gap but am not sure if re-listening to audiobooks is a thing.
You're right that a lot of material really does require a physical book. Anything even remotely technical.
That said, I would argue that a voice actor is far more significant than page formatting when it comes to novels. A good voice actor can turn a good story great, and sometimes a poor story to... acceptable.
I've read thousands of novels over the decades, both with and without audio, so I'm reasonably confident about the above.
> Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.
I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.
Projectors and electronic whiteboards elevated lessons for me. Ever see a science teacher try to draw a galaxy or nebula on a blackboard, and try to describe the awesomeness of it using just words?
Math concepts, especially visualizations, become so much more accessible.
One math teacher in my school used an analog overhead projector as part of his workflow: he would write math on a long transparency roll, sitting at his desk, facing the class, so every student could see exactly how their work should be reasoned-about and laid out properly. He could rewind (literally) to any previous point in the lesson.
As always, it comes down to one's ability to use the tools effectively.
Drop technology entirely and start failing them. You’ll never find an Asian school taking mercy on their kids.
FOMO at its best, fuck their personalities and development and having happy childhood as base layer of personality for rest of their lives, its grades at all costs!
Famously most of asian kids wear glasses from studying all the time, well we need up up that up! What if they overtake us in some rat race. Not the best parenting but some folks are like that and then it shows on kids, thats true.
No one said it is about grades at all cost. Education, at all cost, yes.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
Reading/writing is a much more dense and navigable way of taking in and recording information than speech. Efficient use of AI requires being very good at reading quickly and having the comprehension skills to pick up on nuances that suggest a hole in the AI's work.
In a world where AI is empowering existing experts while risking junior hiring, the young should be aiming to be competitive with those experts, not aiming below even current juniors. If, as a human, you're just acting as a glorified harness around an LLM, you're more replaceable.
In my opinion it is. Reading can convey information faster than even sped up videos, is easier to skim, and has high precision.
Im not saying it is the best for everyone, but it has been proven repeatedly to beat out any other method in the majority of the population. Plus its time stability and storage is much easier and reliable.
It also could have other side benefits like focus or perhaps something like visual acuity, much like how writing by hand can develop good hand-eye coordination. If someone struggled to write with a pencil for example I would be very wary about handing them sharp tools or knives.
Why learn arithmetic when we have calculators?
Reading, writing, and math are foundational skills that, aside from having enormous utility in their own right, are also crucial for developing sharp, creative, and analytical minds.
Take writing as an example: it challenges you to organize your thoughts, patch up the weaknesses of your arguments, and find effective means of connecting with your audience. In so doing, you restructure your own understanding of the world, deepening your expertise and mental schemas. That's something an LLM can't do.
The point is that "doing hard things" is required to be a successful adult. Meanwhile, the bar for what constitutes a "hard thing" is dropping fast.
When I used to read for pleasure, I did it because it was pleasurable. Not because it would be the hard thing. It was fun and easy.
What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".
This is conflating hard with unpleasant. A child just learning to read is going to find it hard to do, yet through adults pushing them to do the hard thing, they learn to read and sometimes begin to find it to be pleasurable. Building most skills is hard, yet that doesn't exclude taking pleasure in it. Many of us taught ourselves to code, the fact that we enjoyed it doesn't mean it wasn't also hard.
We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.
I said it waa easy, because it was easy. I am not conflating hard and unpleasant, you ignore my experience that reading for fun was easy.
You did not struggled and it was not hard. Kids books were written to be easy at age they were targetted at.
If the issue was just "hard" videogames woulsndo the job.
Everything is easy when you've done a lot of it, that's how the brain works.
That's coasting though, or at best flow. Neither state makes you better. The entire point of making something easy is to be able to build on it.
I don't think this is accurate. In basically every single game or sport with measurable outcomes, doing things are relatively simple to you (and often enjoyable) endlessly - drives improvement.
If you want to make the argument that it's muscle memory in e.g. shooting freethrows in basketball, then you can see the exact same thing in doing chess tactical puzzles. There's even one successful learning method called the Woodpecker Method where you endlessly repeat over the same series of tactics working to get the time it takes you to do them down to essentially instantaneous. And it works excellently for improvement, and I obviously don't just mean improvement at doing that set of tactics.
I mean it’s obviously not just that otherwise we’d make every kid play the original Donkey Kong and call that a success
The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived but not all of them.
I might be missing some other reasons why this could be happening, like increases in game balance and coordination.
Play Mario Odyssey for an hour or two then play Super Mario Bros 1, 2, or 3 as one startling example.
Mario games have reduced the difficulty a lot, although you should probably compare Mario Wonder with SMB 1-3. Odyssey is more comparable with Mario 64.
One of the things though is when most peopley play SMB 1-3 today, they're playing with input lag. Mario Wonder was designed with input lag in mind, SMB 1 was not and it increases the difficulty.
Mario Wonder lets you choose to use invulnerable characters, etc. There was only one level I remember needing to try many times to beat. OTOH, there's lots of difficult levels in smb 1...
That's mostly the MBAification of games that I think is completely disconnected from what most kids want. But the MBA logic is about maximizing market reach. Relatively few people will choose not to play a game because it's too easy, but ostensibly the same isn't true of games that are seen as difficult. Of course Elden Ring, Dark Souls, et al completely proved this to be nonsense (to say nothing of pvp games), but who's gonna let a bit of reality get in the way of pie charts, bar graphs, and powerpoints?
In the world of games outside the big money AAA MBA stuff, there's plenty of highly challenging franchises that maintain true to themselves and thrive, even with plenty of kids playing. E.g. - I suspect the median age for Binding of Isaac is well below the age of consent.
The bar isn’t dropping, it’s shifting.
Shifting to a position below where it previously was? I don't get your point... Is there's a new bar? What would you say the new expectation is that doesn't build on previous core skills?
As in, these kids are crushing tiktok reels?
I think a world where people are just automatons who ask AIs to do things for them is a pretty bleak world.
Reading, writing, being able to focus on things... these are healthy things that healthy brains do. And I don't think that's just a case of it always being that way in the past, so any change to that is bad. I think humans as a species will die if we give this sort of thing up, and I don't think I'm exaggerating or engaging in AI doomerism here.
Not to mention that AI isn't that good. Maybe it will be, but I'm skeptical. Human progress will basically stop if we lose a generation of kids to this brainrot, with barely-capable AIs that can't even design their successors and move humanity forward. Who else will push humanity forward, if the next several generations of kids are intellectually incapable of doing so?
What kind of world are we building where advanced technology is just used to stop living as full human beings? Where’s the desire to self-actualize? Did it start dying when people got glued to the idiot box?
I am not sure what to make of this devils advocate comment. Are you just throwing opposites at the wall? I genuinely don't know how to interpret the query about attention span?
Are you suggesting that a lower attention span has no impact? I don't know how I would learn things if my attention span was shit, or even sit with difficult problems or emotions and resolve them. Even just general productivity, which, sure there are some arguments about good vs bad productivity, but in general, any form of productivity will benefit from better attention span I think?
My pen weighs in at 10g in my backpack and is capable of durably recording information for thousands of years. No battery to charge, cheap, and plentiful.
I use my fingers to interact with computers, and they don't have any extra weight at all, as they are already attached to me. You need to also count the weight of the paper.
And, no, your pen and paper are not able to durably record information for thousands of years. Unless you have some really bespoke setup.
Acid-free paper and a carbon-black ink, or a modern neutral pH iron-gall ink, should last 1000 years if stored correctly. 2000 might be pushing it, but under a controlled atmosphere it should be possible.
Only if you're writing on parchment, paper only lasts a few hundred years.
At the Montessori school my kid goes to, children read a lot. They have access to the Library, can ask the teacher to go there when they need/want to. The school has a no phone policy, children are not allowed to bring them to school. Computers are only in the computer room for children to access when they want to do research and there are no laptops in the class room.
It works well and the children are both happy and do well academically
This has been tested: human instructor vs video, and the human instruction provides measurably better outcomes by an order of magnitude
Those downvoting you appear unaware what 'Devils Advocate' means.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/devil-s-...
How sad it has come to this.
What an asinine take.
Maybe that's because pleasure is down among schoolkids.
Every minute of the day dedicated to homework, or a structured activity that can be a bullet point on a college application.
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
Hey, come on... I have ADHD and love reading. No need to use that as a bludgeon. It's unnecessary...
Apologies friend, neighbor comment has it right. Not trying to shade anyone with ADHD, just calling out as a widespread/modern challenge. Same with poor reading skills. Parents, schools, and culture have failed many people, who might otherwise have been avid readers, but instead they don't even know the joy of reading a good book.
I didn't read it that way, I thought the GP was listing it as one of the newer challenges to getting kids (and adults!) to read. IMO it doesn't prevent you from loving to read, but it does make it harder.
Okay, well that's definitely a more interpretation that I didn't see. I may have misunderstood. Thanks, friend.
Doesn't your ADHD interfere with sitting down and reading?
You misunderstand how it works. It's not "can't pay attention" like people think. It's "have difficultly directing attention". There's two different failure modes. One is "not interesting enough, so can't keep my attention focused on it" and the other is "too interesting, so can't take my attention off it". You'll find ADHDers that like reading probably read a lot.
One part of ADHD is hyperfocus. ADHD is a dopamine deficiency issue, so when something highly stimulating (like a good book, or writing code) causes a release of dopamine the brain locks onto it and won't let go.
not if it's a fantastic book
I knew a friend with ADHD that had a hard time reading. I suggested to him that he visualize and draw an image of everything he’s reading in his mind and apparently that made that a lot easier.
Um, were they not visualizing books as they read them? I'm assuming fiction like novels. How could one possibly read a novel and not visualize everything they're reading?
Oh have I got a treat for you! The ability to make the magic pictures appear in your mind is not actually a universal human experience. There's a broad range of related topics, but the place to start is probably 'Aphantasia'[0].
It's quite interesting to talk about with friends and compare experiences. Good if you're all comfortable enough to allow a little bit of "treating the witness as hostile".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
> these days
Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
Funnily enough, smart phones (and previous feature phones with their SMS) have probably gotten more people into reading and writing for leisure than any other technology since the printing press.
Granted, people are not doing any long form reading and writing on these devices, but they are reading and writing.
I disagree, people used to read newspapers and magazines. Even if you were not an intellectual or interested in politics you'd read the sports daily, or the gossip column.
This activity has largely disappeared.
Yeah obviously they still teach letters at school. People can read their name.
But reading a long form article about the Iran war? It looks bleak.
You’re underestimating how many people almost entirely just doom scroll videos, especially young people.
For a brief period before instagrams and youtube became mainstream and tiktoks came along to decimate whatever was left.
This is an exaggeration, but I wouldn't rule out your average smartphone user reading less in an average commute than they would do just reading store signs as they pass...
But they're reading multiple words overlayed on the 30 second video! And they sometimes write "wtf stupd g* n* lol" as a comment! That gotta count!?!
For what it’s worth I think people have always been this way. I used to read during recess when I was in middle school. I usually could not wait to get back to my books. But the other kids saw this as profoundly antisocial. I wasn’t being antisocial exactly; I was pretty shy and had a very active imagination. Amusingly, the school bullies misinterpreted my bookishness as weakness. That changed when I (accidentally) knocked out a kid’s front teeth during a fight. I felt terrible about it but the bullying stopped immediately.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
Similarly, people are socially allowed to be buried in their phones while at work and this doesn't get critized by managers much, but god help you if you had a magazine or book open when taking a short break.
If you don't pay attention to the NFL, you might have missed Philadelphia Eagles player AJ Brown reading a book on the sidelines:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/koyNVSD2vyU
There were many performative hot takes at the time. The best part though, for me, was coach Nick Sirianni defending him when asked about it after the game. Sirianni said:
> Some guys pray in between, some guys mediate in between. A.J. reads in between. Whatever these guys need to do to put their mind in a place where they can play with great detail and great effort, I fully encourage them to do that
I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the background - it’s explicit and relevant to the story (which has spawned a counter-culture of writers).
My apologies for over-commenting in this page but, uh, is there a way to read without reading the words? WTF does "I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes." mean? Are people reading with their eyes closed or using braille or listening to the paper or something?
It always has been negative attention gathering - reading marks you as a nerd.
And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.
It's not that there's social pressure specifically against reading. Just that there's social pressure to conform, and most people aren't reading.
Is this in the united states? The usa has a shockingly anti-intellectual culture and has been so for my whole life.
I think this is how Beauty And The Beast opens.
I’m 65. I’m pretty sure I heard plenty of snide “nose buried in a book” cracks when i was growing up.
It's not about the reading. It's about: a) being different, and b) making them feel guilty for not reading themselves. I used to get the same for being vegetarian, for much the same reasons. These days it's less weird and, oddly, I feel like people are almost envious that I get to have a "cool" label and they don't. It's strange because it's quite easy to get the label yourself if you want it, but it's hard to change habits.
I read a lot too, but it’s somewhere around 50 a year. How on earth are you getting through two books a week? What sort of books are these? I confess I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy that are between 500 and 800 pages each. That’s not all of my reading, but I’d say at least 50% is.
On vacation, for example, I'll read 1-2 books a day. I would say most books I read are in the 300-350p range; just because that's what most books are, it seems.
Well it’s just cope. It’s the same way in the UK where drinkers will sneer at non drinkers, or meat eaters at vegans. You will get criticised for losing weight or making dietary changes. People imagine that someone else may feel superior to them for making better choices, and they absolutely hate this.
Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional.
Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.
However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.
I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.
Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.
Child raised with this mentality will throw you in a retirement home and disown you. I don’t blame them one bit.
I remember when Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Mix of 'Choose your own adventure' and solo D+D adventure) were big in the UK in the 80s, and teachers were sniffy about them not being proper reading. I bet they'd love their kids to be reading them now.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
Did you ask them how much they read as ebooks? Libby is very popular.
That would have been a good follow up question - I'll ask next term.
Is libby very popular among young school children? Based on surveys asking how often kids read per week I would figure ebook reading is also down. They don't usually ask about the format.
My kids use Libby very often.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.
My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.
Isn't this the problem though, books are no longer attractive with all the other options? How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?
I think the content of many books is much cooler than the crap on my timelines. There’s just higher entropy (or activation energy?) to get the book picked up and opened vs the serotonin lever in our pockets.
I’ve just strived to read like hell to my kids and make reading one of their most fun things around. Pretty much all we read is stuff they like, even if I hate it (I’m looking at you, Pokemon novels). If they like an author (in our house we love Daniel Pinkwater) I will go out of my way to find that authors books. We write to authors, we talk about what we read (somehow I serialised a retelling of Killing Commendatore), my 8 yo listens to my audiobooks in the car with me, we are frickin bookworms.
And of course they still play Minecraft and animal crossing. It’s just that picking up a book is one of their default go-tos, and I think that’s enough. They’re building the habit and the understanding of what reading is about, and if we keep that up they will be ok.
> How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?
You don't need to pretend it didn't exist, you need to legislate and ensure that access to it is cut off uniformly for developing minds. We already see the emergence of this kind of legislation with Australia enforcing a ban for social media under 16s; and other countries in the process of legislating ones.
I happen to favor this approach because "pretend it doesn't exist" strategy doesn't work for addictive things that are left lying around the house for kids to access. If society in general can prevent children from getting access to alcohol before 21, there's no particular reason the same can't be done for addictive "social" media algorithms.
We can’t, it’s simply too addictive in comparison. It produces more dopamine, more quickly and consistently and there’s no way books will ever compete. Really it’s not even technology that is the problem, it’s specifically just algorithmic driven social media. We have to actively avoid the addictive algorithms and it’s really difficult.
It's not necessarily that simple. Both I and my wife read, almost every week I read my daughter passages I've come across in my books, we have bookshelves in every room. We read to our younger children and they enjoy being read to.
I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.
Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.
FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.
My wife is a school librarian and really dislikes graphic novels, in part because they are so expensive they eat all of her meager budget. But she recognizes they can be the hook that catches a future reader. Not always, but sometimes she can get a kid to transition to full books from graphic novels, so they do have their place. They seem very useful with her significant ESL population.
I logged in especially to second what lukewrites has said.
My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.
My son is in this transition phase right now. There are some of these "dumb" series which offer books ranging from mostly-image-some-text, some-images-some-text to text. The prose offerings are a great on/off ramp, since he knows the characters and conventions. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this trajectory and really don't even care how dumb, simple, whatever these books may be: my son is reading grade levels ahead of the rest of his class and these books have been a major contributor to his success.
My first daughter I managed to flip the switch for reading through Tintin and other graphic novels. My younger daughter skipped that entirely. She started reading later than the first, but jumped right in to longer full length books that were captivating for her (they were series she had seen her sister read).
I completely agree that we can encourage but reading needs to come naturally to them. You can't force-feed curiosity and passion, which is what reading is all about for young people.
I was going to mention this as well. Everything is a graphic novel these days. Go to the bookstore, and at least half of the shelf space dedicated to children is for graphic novels (and that doesn’t include the manga section). Almost every book series has a graphic novel version. And some of these are just complete skip. Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants from my days, now DogMan and others) just pumps out the most low effort stuff imaginable.
It’s no surprise kids are reading way behind what previous generations did when this is what they are bombarded with.
Less literature on offer? It seems to me the easiest time in human history to access any information whatsoever, including any and all literature.
The quality of modern literature may well be declining, but the is literally endless reading material everywhere
I think GP meant it's not just "laying around", you have to actively look for books.
When I was a kid I had a ton of books from my parents in the house and when bored I could pick one up.
That's not the same as having a computer, tablet or phone, cause kids will gravitate towards non-reading activities.
(If everyone in the family owns an e-reader this obviously would be a different situation)
No, that is the wrong causality. There is a third factor which make both parents and kids not read.
> there is less literature on offer
Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.
Nor do they have books in the house. It's a great time to be a book lover because you can accumulate a huge library for next to nothing by harvesting all the stuff people are giving away. But you can go into a house with children these days and see not a single book in sight. It's sad.
I'm definitely on the "it's the devices" train, but reading instruction in school in the US after high school really breaks students into an absolute exhaustion with the practice. Not to mention they're still reading the stuff I read in the '80s. Certainly some exceptions but I do not think secondary instruction has the right take on this.
Education today is broken in general.
Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.
Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.
1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.
2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".
3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.
4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.
5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.
Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.
The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated from high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between being forced to read books/topics at school I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
The research shows sharpest declines at 13 years. We have a lot of infrastructure to support young readers. But not the the older readers.
It’s not just screens.
Teenagers are overscheduled compared to years past. My son’s purpose in high school seems to be to build a resume for a future college. OTOH I got into a decent college with mediocre grades and not even trying.
He reads a lot - but it’s assigned reading.
So nerdy, smart kids like my son get taken out of the reading for fun group. Exactly the kinds of kids that would have been reading casually in decades past.
It means we’re moving back to peasant strata that do the most menial jobs and live in ghettos. Kids that can read will be in charge, mostly managing functional idiots who can’t even watch an entire TikTok short. It will be a huge underclass that will be too dumb to riot.
Idk, since letting my son stay up as late as he wants reading trips to the library have been weekly, even as he transitions to actual no image chapter books. As others have said we try to time box tech best we can. I may have to physically lift him from the bed some days but it is worth it to find him passed out with a book in his hand at 10pm.
I'm dyslexic and find reading genuinely taxing — my imagination moves faster than I can read, I lose the thread, and I've never enjoyed it. The last book I read for pleasure was when I was fifteen. I don't feel like I'm missing something.
But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.
He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.
I read a lot of books when I was younger, but I also read a lot of magazines. They gave me something light in between books. Now devices have replaced magazines and they suck you in.
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...
PISA does not measure reading for pleasure, it measures reading for factual information. There are questions about reading graphs, figuring out information only indirectly mentioned, that sort of thing. It does not care whether you get emotionally invested in this or that character or story.
Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.
Kids are overloaded by homework, why would they want to do any "pleasure" reading in addition?
If I watched training videos all day at work, I don't think that would diminish my enjoyment of netflix
Well yes, because video is a different medium.
for pleasure?
I don't mean to put this report down -- it's a good thing to monitor and report on. I'm glad someone is paying attention.
And how are the parents/adults doing?
It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.
While this is probably bad, reading gets more credit than it should, especially when it gets to reading junk content, not engaging with the content, and escapism. A baseline level of reading is important, but beyond that, I'd rather kids go out and do things than just read about them.
Recommendations? What are you reading?
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
Here are our top ~500 English picture books from Open Library that my kids liked enough that we've read at least twice.
The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.
https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
Kings of the Wyld is a lot of fun. Plus it’s always refreshing to have a middle-aged protagonist instead of a teen or young adult.
This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more.
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
In high school I was at a friend’s house. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books I loved and the other half with books I’d never heard of! I felt like a prospector striking gold :) Cool to think that we have something similar on demand now!
Oh and the best author from that discovery was hands down Garth Nix. I love the Abhorsen series!
Same, mainstream book sites are a bit broken when it comes to surfacing anything outside the one size fits all notion of "best sellers". I rarely care about best sellers. Bland thrillers, chick lit, etc. Not my thing. And the whole all recommendations converge on Harry Potter as the best thing ever is a bit lame at this point.
LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.
I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.
What was the 'don't read the summaries' book?
Eversion by Alistair Reynolds
Really loved The Hyperion Cantos and The Forever War.
For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons is great. It may also be nice to recommend books that have movie or streaming series to them. Books are most of the time better than the movie as your own fantasy and imagination just makes it so. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a good example.
This is a good sub for discussing sci-fi and finding recs. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/
I read the Wheel of Time series. It's all I read. It took about 18 months. It's great, though. I'm sad it's over, and I'm going to miss the characters.
I love history and biography. Robert Caro' biography of LBJ. I also loved Don Quixote. The Iliad.
Presently surprised by the lack of /lit/ meme recommendations like “infinite jest” or “gravities rainbow”.
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
Just did the bobiverse series after furiously consuming all the dungeon crawler carl and now I am starting Red Rising.
Legacy Fleet Trilogy
Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)
Another idea for you - search for "booktube" on youtube. Plenty of recommendations!
Ubik is one of my faves
C-SPAN: Doctor on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
I wonder how much of the problem is the books they're given to read.
Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.
My son (8 years old) is a bit of a unicorn in that he lives his devices and his books pretty much equally.
On any given day we're either telling him to put away his switch or his book because that's how engrossed he gets.
Realistically speaking, I also think of this as a kind of evolutionary process. It is about obtaining necessary information within the flood of information. I do think the amount of reading is important, but I also wonder whether unconditionally suppressing dopamine is the right approach. Wouldn't we become more vulnerable if we were raised in a sterile environment?
I think the middle ground is important.
How do books equal sterile environment?
It is not that books are a sterile environment. Rather, I think the very attempt to isolate someone in an internet environment is itself a kind of sterile environment. To be honest, I think it is now difficult to get all information from books alone. I like reading too, but reading ultimately has a point where it becomes fixed at a particular moment. Do books from the 2010s align with theories from the 2020s? I don't think so. There is no need to know every trending theory, but conversely, I question whether we should be immersed only in books. Since the way we obtain information has fundamentally changed, I wonder whether reading must necessarily remain a hobby
I think the advantage of books is clear. A book has a logical beginning, development, turn, and conclusion all contained within one volume. In other words, you can learn that format itself, the method of logical exposition. But upon reflection, that is just a form, not the very essence of logical speaking. I certainly agree that books have formal advantages, but I don't think those are unique to books. Rather, the biggest drawback of books is that their form is fixed at a particular point in time. Critical thinking is not developed through books alone, and frankly, not all books are that good in terms of content either.
Are we surprised?
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
This isn’t a bad thing? Kids nowadays have the attention span of puppies. It’s been shown extensively that doomscrolling, switching context every 30s isn’t good for the brain.
It’s absolutely a bad thing, and there’s extensive research demonstrating it
Perhaps the research is wrong though because our way of thinking has been "slow, controlled, non intensive".
Now that technology CAN give us content at faster speeds, isn't it better for the brains to change to adapt to the short form cycles? Otherwise you'll be left behind stuck on topic one when the new generation have absorbed 1, 2, 3, 4. etc.
Call me old fashioned but I do not think complicated topics can be summarised in a Tweet.
Books were already losing the fight on road trips once the gameboy came out - I can't imagine what having every movie, tv show, and song in a flashing touchscreen connected to the internet, why would I pick up a book that takes so much work to deliver fun when I can play AstroBlasters and watch tiktoks of war crimes
If you go to the original link [0] you will see that things are actually pretty stable and okay?
0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/
This is a link to reading test scores. Maybe reading test scores can stay stable while actual reading declines. I don't think situation is fine.
Reader here, about 50 books a year.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.
Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.
I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.
Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.
I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
2012 is pretty much the year smartphone addiction began approaching critical mass
Possibly (probably?) a coincidence, but it did look like broad changes to how reading was taught started to land in 2010-2012: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/common-standards-dr...
The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.
Not a rigorous response, but Minecraft.
Kids were playing a ton of online games before Minecraft.
Yes and no
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
The release of the Xbox coincided with what I viewed as a big jump in video game players. Even the biggest athletic jocks played a ton of Halo. And then not long after that saw much older people start playing games like CoD:MW as after work entertainment instead of just tv.
I would say the Xbox 360 is when it really started to take off, personally
Halo 2 was when many people started gaming
YouTube.
The mayan calendar ended/started a new. So apparently the doomsday did happen, we just did not really notice while being distracted with our new gadgets ...
So you need to look at complete data. This will give you that: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/reading/scores-pe...
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
My guess is smartphones hitting a point of increased adoption. In the "good old days", phone games were honest and not addiction-inducing adware..
you kidding me? they were absolutely addicting. Just not casino style.
Late December 2010 was the last release of a Harry Potter movie, cutting off the movie -> book pipeline.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
> ...someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Did it work? :)
I'm pessimistic about the future. We stopped reading, we are outsourcing thinking to LLM assistants, and we put the dumbest people possible in charge of running the country. I don't see how this could possibly end well.
What if we made books with tiktok length chapters.
And big pictures. Oh wait, I think those are called comics. And the really short ones are children picture books. You know, because small children don't have the concentration to focus on longer stories.
I read to my two kids every day until they were 13-14 years old. They loved books. Every car ride was an opportunity to listen to an audiobook. The kids loved to write and make arts and crafts as well.
During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.
After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.
When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.
Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.
If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.
So how much of this is a consequence of small children being taught to guess instead of to actually read? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing
Am I the only old-head who hates video explanations when what I wanted was something I could read? I hate searching for information in the web and the only relevant results are videos, of course with ads at the front.
You are not. It's infuriating to the point I've used Gemini to make a readable summary of a video, which works pretty well since they have better access to all the video data/metadata than OpenAI/Anthropic.
So ... kids did read more in a time the single most influential kids book series was popular as compared to today? Surprise.
Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.
The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮
(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.
The lack of attention span and calling more than 3 sentences "needlessly verbose". I am just happy that I didn't grow up in the brainrot era.
we have phones and tables to blame. The less of those, the more of reading.
*proceeds to shake fist at table.
"Damn you four legged abomination; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"
Amen brother. I don't know how to hear anymore about tables.
/tableflip
I read books on my phone.
Do internet comments count as reading?
Thanks now I'm imagining HN as an endless torrent of TikTok videos, where it's an AI voice reading the comments.
I don't know if kids are even reading comments. There's another perfectly good video with just a quick swipe.
Among US kids. FTFY.
Apparently in the UK it's up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze93wggw74o
I wonder what is it that makes reading so good but all the other forms of information transmission since then seem to have a somewhat negative effect on overall learning and well-being.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
Many people worry about children not reading enough but when you look at the parents they're all on their phones.
Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.
> parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. F
Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.
When I first got a portable computer I basically immediately stopped reading. Like twelve years back. It only got worse when I got sufficient smart phone. I read basically daily before.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
It's the damn phone.
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
This is why I prefer audibooks piped through my whole house sonos. It allows me to consume long form while walking around the house completing various projects. Reading isn't a chore, but the thing I engage in while doing chores.
That difference is like comparing taking a piss and having sex. While you use the same body part the experiences are not at all alike.
The thing with analogies, we can make them go either way.
It's like having sex after a whole day of sex work. Exhausting.
Have you never read a good book you can't put down?
I can empathize with the commenter you're replying to. I still read for pleasure and have to read constantly for work of course. On some days, I feel like I can't. It is like exercising the same muscle every day which will lead to injury in a short amount of time. Switching to audiobooks or just taking a break does resolve that.
From what I am seeing around me though, reading for pleasure or even to gain knowledge has decreased a lot. I noticed it in adults first and this is being reflected in their children.
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
Quality of what's produced in that medium might be one thing. People reading for pleasure are usually reading works published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality. Sure, it might be "trashy" novels relative to literature, but at least there's a floor to the quality level or else it just doesn't get published.
But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.
> published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality
You can say the same for movies and tv if you filter by IMDB score (which i do). Heck even podcasts get millions of views before I ever hear about them.
Similarly, I listen to a lot of podcasts, but whenever I listen to The Guardian Long Reads (read articles) I’m kinda surprised every time how much higher quality they are than typical podcasts, since they’re based on well written articles.
Because it is exercise for the imaginative mind. Reading can force a reader to build worlds. Some readers are good at this, others need practice. To call reading “consumptive” is severely minimizing literature’s impact on communication throughout human history.
Even looking back at my mother reading Stephen King and romance novels … her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.
Note: this comment written from the bathtub after putting down “The Stand” by Stephen King, you know, one of those “little value” books.
Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to. And while there are works that are better and worse, no matter how lowly the thing is that is being read, that growth still accrues. You could have a child who read nothing but cereal boxes and truck stop restroom graffiti, and he'll be ahead of his classmates on every single thing you can score.
It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
My personal assumption has been that 'pleasure', at least partially, includes expected practical returns. I'd also guess that's at least partially true for kids: "my parents told me if I read a lot, I'll be smart when I grow up", etc.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
>If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
My memory is that the only things better than reading are doing it yourself, and writing about it.
Listening to podcast is not easier then reading. It requires constant attention and does not really allow you to take a break without loosing on. In a lot of ways it is harder and more tiresome. You are free to do some other easy thing while doing it, it can be more engaging due to voices and sounds, but it does not take less effort then reading.
I suppose this varies depending on what type of material is covered in the podcast. We typically assume it contains surface-level content, as their primary purpose is entertainment, but the answer would probably change if we were talking about a lecture.
Reading for pleasure does not imply reading difficult in depth content. Reading for pleasure was reading with entertainment as a primary purpose.
Both reading and podcasts cover range of difficulties and topics.
Yes, we agree on this.
> I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure"
It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.
Fair enough :-) Do you have a theory for why we view reading, even in terms of pleasure, as favorable? I imagine it's because we see some utility in it over other activities.
Reading causes your brain to hallucinate. Visualization is a muscle: reading is the weights at the gym.
> we see some utility
So what utility do you see in Netflix? Or doomscrolling? Or whatever you do for pleasure?
Read good english, speak good english. Read dumb english, speak dumb english.
I think writing is needed to learn how to organize and express complex chains of thoughts. And to learn how to write well, you need to know how to read critically, too. It goes hand in hand. The same skills you apply to the words of others you can apply to your own, if you have them.
I used to read a ton of fiction as a kid, and continued into my late 30s. My reading for pleasure has dropped precipitously of late though, in large part because it gives less dopamine than other things I can do that also make the "productivity" centers of my brain light up. I still read a lot, but it's skewed towards geopolitics, economics and analyses, and most if it is short-form.
It is completely off in the opposite direction
imho its the screen vs no screen that is the problem. Its better to have one thing for a task . for example one notebook one alarm one instrument one book etc. Our brain aint made to have so many thing cramped in one device. I think when i open a screen my brain sees all the functions of the device and cant focus well. But if I read a book my brain knowes this is the book about this and that and nothing else.