6 ms·

Scholars once feared that the book index would destroy reading

149 points by hhs 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blurker 5y ago
This reminds me of an episode of 99% Invisible [0] that I listened to. That episode also covered a bit about the history of indexes (which is relevant to the history of alphabetical sorting), including how scholars feared and resisted the adoption of indexes. It was super fascinating and I highly recommend giving it a listen if you found this article interesting! [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/
- martyvis 5y ago
  As soon as I saw this post I thought it that podcast. It was quite interesting how we take the alphabet as so fundamental. (And with a surname beginning with "V" I was always frustrated at school at being down the back of the line unless an enlightened teacher occasionally mixed it up)
- mortenlarsen 5y ago
  Thanks for that. Now I have 530 episodes in my podcast queue :)
  - DantesKite 5y ago
    On a side note, I've always wish there was an API that could recommend media content. Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs, movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and spit out what you would probably find fascinating.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      You've basically described recommendation engines generally and they tend to deliver mediocre to awful results for a bunch of different reasons. I remember hearing talks on the topic over a decade ago and things haven't really gotten much better--and my sense is that most people have given up on actually creating a good engine.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        I’ve found much better results using your lists to find people with some overlap, and then looking at what they have. Which is basically what HN is.
        timbeccue 5y ago
        Do recommendation algorithms not take this into account already? Perhaps privacy policies make it harder to automate this effectively.
        bombcar 5y ago
        The famous ones may, but it ends up taking into account "what do we want you to see/listen/look at" much more into account.
        ghaff 5y ago
        The original Netflix prize also, it turned out, wasn't really implemented for a number of reasons. But one of them was apparently that Netflix doesn't necessarily want to give you the best recommendations; it wants you to keep your subscription. There's certainly some overlap between those objectives but they're not the same thing.
        bombcar 5y ago
        They're also incentivized to show you things that cost them "nothing" or "less" than others things - and if they KNOW the things you'd like to watch it's better for them to string those out so you keep subscribed. The perfect Netflix customer is one always on the cusp of cancelling from lack of use but never actually does ...
  - xattt 5y ago
    I worked through whatever the length of the queue was in 2017 over the course of a summer and a long driving commute :)
  - fknorangesite 5y ago
    It's a really, really great show. You won't regret it.
- Alex3917 5y ago
  There are still modern authors who buy into this kind of argument. E.g. the late John Taylor Gatto, who refused to use footnotes because he thought they made readers dumb. I forget whether or not his books have indices.
  - gkop 5y ago
    Sorry to hijack you but I can’t help my curiosity. Index: 1) a pointer 2) a structured collection of pointers Indices: two or more pointers Indexes: two or more structured collections of pointers (Where “pointer” is used in a slightly generalized sense, like “reference”) Yay or nay, pedants of HN?
    - Twisol 5y ago
      "To index" means to point, as with your index finger. An index, such as at the end of a book, serves to point into the main body of the work. In this context, I think of an index like a mass noun; the whole thing serves the purpose of pointing, so one does not count the individual entries to quantify the whole. This is the same sense as in database indices, I think. I don't really make a distinction between "indices" and "indexes"; it seems more a matter of how integrated "index" is into English, since "indices" would be (I believe) the Latin pluralization, while "indexes" uses the more typical English plural scheme. They index (ha) the same semantic meaning in my mind. (We have the same issue with "appendix" and "appendixes" vs "appendices". It's telling that neither spelling bothers iOS as I type this.)
      - zarzavat 5y ago
        Then you have octopus with many plural forms: octopuses, octopi, octopodes (oct-oh-pohds, oct-o-po-dees), octopen, octopees, octopa, ...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising. There is a book some folks mention written about alphabetical order. There was also a book written some years prior about the telephone book. Google has obliterated alphabetical business listings.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising. AAAAAASEO.com will be the first result for every search.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      If the sorting is by domain name, I usually find 0 comes first. Something like 000000AAAAAASEO.com. There is now a .aaa gTLD. Perhaps they would cash in. Thus the first result might be 000000AAAAAASE0.aaa Sorting by business name might make more sense. Naming a business tends to rely on trademark law, which IMO is a better system for resolving name disputes than the ICANN domain name system.
jhoechtl 5y ago
Scholars once feared that a search engine would destroy intelligent reasoning.
- mortenlarsen 5y ago
  It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples biases. (both search engines and other content ranking systems).
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me personally.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Oral historians also thought writing would make people lazy and doom humanity to ignorance. People just fear change.
  - dmix 5y ago
    My take away: People often think they know whats best for others and create needless roadblocks in their 'best interest'. Or the roadblocks were created to address a narrow problem set, while ignoring the broader benefits of doing so. So everyone gets punished in the interests of a few who don't like to read.
  - DenisM 5y ago
    > People just fear change. That is a rather shallow dismissal of your opponents. Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that?
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that? Their stated reasons were certainly nuanced and fairly well argued. They were also completely wrong, built on a stack of assumptions and biases. The whole thing was just a solid congealed lump of motivated reasoning driven by fear of change. Plato and Socrates apparently feared literacy in common men, and bemoaned the decline of memorization and the tradition of oral instruction. After all, if you had a scroll, you could reread just the passage you wanted, divorced from it's context in a larger argument! Terrible! The dangers of cheap books printed by the thousands on Gutenberg's invention were decried in tracts produced unironically on that selfsame malefic device. In the 18th and 19th centuries, popular novels were the great danger, inflaming the passions of women, agitating men to be unhappy with their lot and make demands of their betters (or conversely encouraging idleness and escapism into fiction). As far as I know, paperbacks as a format didn't get the same treatment, but cheap pulp magazines and comics certainly did. And now the Internet is the Big Bad (not too long ago it was television, then transistor radios, D&D, and video games). Algorithmic news feeds are currently causing problems, but that has more to do with the incentives of the businesses running them than anything inherent in the concept.
frostburg 5y ago
I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages, was also harmful with arguments along similar lines.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  In a modern context, PDF (pages) or websites (infinite scroll). Personally I like scrolling, usually with a 2-finger gesture on a trackpad. For keyboard-only navigation (e.g. UNIX "less"), pages make sense though, controlled with the spacebar or Page Up/Page Down keys. Scroll and pinch-to-zoom on a single trackpad is particularly user-friendly in my opinion, as well as two-finger tap to right click and search/define/copy-paste/etc.
ImaCake 5y ago
There is, of course, a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ Just goes to show that this sort of thing is not unique or new! Reading is something done mostly on the toilet or waiting for the bus. There’s no reason to think it only happens on a quiet sunday morning.
karaterobot 5y ago
>... on the Continent Galileo grumbled at the armchair philosophers who, “in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire into their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them.” That quote does not appear to be dismissive of indexes to me. It appears to be about people who appeal to authority rather than doing their own empirical research. I didn't see other quotes to support the claim that [a significant number of] scholars feared that the index would destroy reading, and I'm a bit skeptical of the claim offhand. I wish there was some information structure that would allow me to find such supporting evidence more easily...
- hhs 5y ago
  Further down that quote, the author talks about the issues John Marbeck and J. Horace Round had faced. Also note, this piece is a book excerpt.
wmedrano 5y ago
The move to AI assisted coding will destroy programming.
DenisM 5y ago
The discussion would not be complete without mentioning that Socrates opposed writing entirely, and he provided good reasons. http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2007/11/socrates-objections-to-writing.html?m=1 http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2007/11/socrates-objectio...
Barrin92 5y ago
I'll latch on the point being made about the capacity of long reading being eroded by tech. The author dismisses it as old-timey, but I think this is largely true[1] >"The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015. Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014." I think even behaviour like calling a 10 minute video "too long", is now common. It seems absurd to me to just describe this neutrally as the author does and call it an 'adaption' comparing it to us behaving differently than 11th century monks. Reading differently might be fine, but when anything longer than five minutes of sustained concentration is too much you're getting to a point where you physically can't actually engage with anything in long form any more. [1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnysn2QvwJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnys...
- mr_toad 5y ago
  In 1982 on a Sunday afternoon, after the shops were all closed, and you’d already read yesterday’s paper, and last months Practical Computing your options for passive entertainment were limited to TV, radio and books. I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    I tried to read every single book in my village's library in early nineties. Only skipped later parts of series that I've already tried. We had 4 TV programs, no internet yet, no kids my age in the neighborhood, what was I supposed to do.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  On the other hand, the longest works of written fictions in the world are fanfictions published on the internet. These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil. The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.
GameOfKnowing 5y ago
It did. You just don’t remember the sublime experience that once was.
lamontcg 5y ago
People don't know how to use google search to find answers anyway. And University libraries have had search engines since before the web existed and a part of scholarly learning was supposed to be understanding how to use them, so you could find whatever article you were looking for in the library. I'd be happy if the kids today would get even better at using search engines.

149 points by hhs 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

This reminds me of an episode of 99% Invisible [0] that I listened to. That episode also covered a bit about the history of indexes (which is relevant to the history of alphabetical sorting), including how scholars feared and resisted the adoption of indexes. It was super fascinating and I highly recommend giving it a listen if you found this article interesting! [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/

martyvis 5y ago
As soon as I saw this post I thought it that podcast. It was quite interesting how we take the alphabet as so fundamental. (And with a surname beginning with "V" I was always frustrated at school at being down the back of the line unless an enlightened teacher occasionally mixed it up)
mortenlarsen 5y ago
Thanks for that. Now I have 530 episodes in my podcast queue :)
- DantesKite 5y ago
  On a side note, I've always wish there was an API that could recommend media content. Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs, movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and spit out what you would probably find fascinating.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You've basically described recommendation engines generally and they tend to deliver mediocre to awful results for a bunch of different reasons. I remember hearing talks on the topic over a decade ago and things haven't really gotten much better--and my sense is that most people have given up on actually creating a good engine.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I’ve found much better results using your lists to find people with some overlap, and then looking at what they have. Which is basically what HN is.
      - timbeccue 5y ago
        Do recommendation algorithms not take this into account already? Perhaps privacy policies make it harder to automate this effectively.
        bombcar 5y ago
        The famous ones may, but it ends up taking into account "what do we want you to see/listen/look at" much more into account.
        ghaff 5y ago
        The original Netflix prize also, it turned out, wasn't really implemented for a number of reasons. But one of them was apparently that Netflix doesn't necessarily want to give you the best recommendations; it wants you to keep your subscription. There's certainly some overlap between those objectives but they're not the same thing.
        bombcar 5y ago
        They're also incentivized to show you things that cost them "nothing" or "less" than others things - and if they KNOW the things you'd like to watch it's better for them to string those out so you keep subscribed. The perfect Netflix customer is one always on the cusp of cancelling from lack of use but never actually does ...
- xattt 5y ago
  I worked through whatever the length of the queue was in 2017 over the course of a summer and a long driving commute :)
- fknorangesite 5y ago
  It's a really, really great show. You won't regret it.
Alex3917 5y ago
There are still modern authors who buy into this kind of argument. E.g. the late John Taylor Gatto, who refused to use footnotes because he thought they made readers dumb. I forget whether or not his books have indices.
- gkop 5y ago
  Sorry to hijack you but I can’t help my curiosity. Index: 1) a pointer 2) a structured collection of pointers Indices: two or more pointers Indexes: two or more structured collections of pointers (Where “pointer” is used in a slightly generalized sense, like “reference”) Yay or nay, pedants of HN?
  - Twisol 5y ago
    "To index" means to point, as with your index finger. An index, such as at the end of a book, serves to point into the main body of the work. In this context, I think of an index like a mass noun; the whole thing serves the purpose of pointing, so one does not count the individual entries to quantify the whole. This is the same sense as in database indices, I think. I don't really make a distinction between "indices" and "indexes"; it seems more a matter of how integrated "index" is into English, since "indices" would be (I believe) the Latin pluralization, while "indexes" uses the more typical English plural scheme. They index (ha) the same semantic meaning in my mind. (We have the same issue with "appendix" and "appendixes" vs "appendices". It's telling that neither spelling bothers iOS as I type this.)
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      Then you have octopus with many plural forms: octopuses, octopi, octopodes (oct-oh-pohds, oct-o-po-dees), octopen, octopees, octopa, ...
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising. There is a book some folks mention written about alphabetical order. There was also a book written some years prior about the telephone book. Google has obliterated alphabetical business listings.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising. AAAAAASEO.com will be the first result for every search.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    If the sorting is by domain name, I usually find 0 comes first. Something like 000000AAAAAASEO.com. There is now a .aaa gTLD. Perhaps they would cash in. Thus the first result might be 000000AAAAAASE0.aaa Sorting by business name might make more sense. Naming a business tends to rely on trademark law, which IMO is a better system for resolving name disputes than the ICANN domain name system.

jhoechtl 5y ago

Scholars once feared that a search engine would destroy intelligent reasoning.

mortenlarsen 5y ago
It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples biases. (both search engines and other content ranking systems).
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me personally.
cm2012 5y ago
Oral historians also thought writing would make people lazy and doom humanity to ignorance. People just fear change.
- dmix 5y ago
  My take away: People often think they know whats best for others and create needless roadblocks in their 'best interest'. Or the roadblocks were created to address a narrow problem set, while ignoring the broader benefits of doing so. So everyone gets punished in the interests of a few who don't like to read.
- DenisM 5y ago
  > People just fear change. That is a rather shallow dismissal of your opponents. Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that?
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that? Their stated reasons were certainly nuanced and fairly well argued. They were also completely wrong, built on a stack of assumptions and biases. The whole thing was just a solid congealed lump of motivated reasoning driven by fear of change. Plato and Socrates apparently feared literacy in common men, and bemoaned the decline of memorization and the tradition of oral instruction. After all, if you had a scroll, you could reread just the passage you wanted, divorced from it's context in a larger argument! Terrible! The dangers of cheap books printed by the thousands on Gutenberg's invention were decried in tracts produced unironically on that selfsame malefic device. In the 18th and 19th centuries, popular novels were the great danger, inflaming the passions of women, agitating men to be unhappy with their lot and make demands of their betters (or conversely encouraging idleness and escapism into fiction). As far as I know, paperbacks as a format didn't get the same treatment, but cheap pulp magazines and comics certainly did. And now the Internet is the Big Bad (not too long ago it was television, then transistor radios, D&D, and video games). Algorithmic news feeds are currently causing problems, but that has more to do with the incentives of the businesses running them than anything inherent in the concept.

frostburg 5y ago

I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages, was also harmful with arguments along similar lines.

peterburkimsher 5y ago
In a modern context, PDF (pages) or websites (infinite scroll). Personally I like scrolling, usually with a 2-finger gesture on a trackpad. For keyboard-only navigation (e.g. UNIX "less"), pages make sense though, controlled with the spacebar or Page Up/Page Down keys. Scroll and pinch-to-zoom on a single trackpad is particularly user-friendly in my opinion, as well as two-finger tap to right click and search/define/copy-paste/etc.

ImaCake 5y ago

There is, of course, a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ Just goes to show that this sort of thing is not unique or new! Reading is something done mostly on the toilet or waiting for the bus. There’s no reason to think it only happens on a quiet sunday morning.

karaterobot 5y ago

>... on the Continent Galileo grumbled at the armchair philosophers who, “in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire into their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them.” That quote does not appear to be dismissive of indexes to me. It appears to be about people who appeal to authority rather than doing their own empirical research. I didn't see other quotes to support the claim that [a significant number of] scholars feared that the index would destroy reading, and I'm a bit skeptical of the claim offhand. I wish there was some information structure that would allow me to find such supporting evidence more easily...

hhs 5y ago
Further down that quote, the author talks about the issues John Marbeck and J. Horace Round had faced. Also note, this piece is a book excerpt.

wmedrano 5y ago

The move to AI assisted coding will destroy programming.

DenisM 5y ago

The discussion would not be complete without mentioning that Socrates opposed writing entirely, and he provided good reasons. http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2007/11/socrates-objections-to-writing.html?m=1 http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2007/11/socrates-objectio...

Barrin92 5y ago

I'll latch on the point being made about the capacity of long reading being eroded by tech. The author dismisses it as old-timey, but I think this is largely true[1] >"The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015. Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014." I think even behaviour like calling a 10 minute video "too long", is now common. It seems absurd to me to just describe this neutrally as the author does and call it an 'adaption' comparing it to us behaving differently than 11th century monks. Reading differently might be fine, but when anything longer than five minutes of sustained concentration is too much you're getting to a point where you physically can't actually engage with anything in long form any more. [1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnysn2QvwJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnys...

mr_toad 5y ago
In 1982 on a Sunday afternoon, after the shops were all closed, and you’d already read yesterday’s paper, and last months Practical Computing your options for passive entertainment were limited to TV, radio and books. I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.
- ajuc 5y ago
  I tried to read every single book in my village's library in early nineties. Only skipped later parts of series that I've already tried. We had 4 TV programs, no internet yet, no kids my age in the neighborhood, what was I supposed to do.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
On the other hand, the longest works of written fictions in the world are fanfictions published on the internet. These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil. The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.

GameOfKnowing 5y ago

It did. You just don’t remember the sublime experience that once was.

lamontcg 5y ago

People don't know how to use google search to find answers anyway. And University libraries have had search engines since before the web existed and a part of scholarly learning was supposed to be understanding how to use them, so you could find whatever article you were looking for in the library. I'd be happy if the kids today would get even better at using search engines.