6 ms·

My anecdotal experience with the people I meet and talk with fall into two very clear buckets: those that read books and those that don't. I've been able to pr

My anecdotal experience with the people I meet and talk with fall into two very clear buckets: those that read books and those that don't. I've been able to predict with 100% accuracy so far (N=12) which bucket a person falls into solely based on if the person regurgitates mainstream narratives uncritically, regardless of political party. Having a discussion with someone that has additional information external to the narrative seems to be in short supply and stands out, probably more than it should. I'm curious if anyone else on HN has experienced similar and/or can provide some further insight to this phenomena. Thanks!

kryptn 5y ago
I'm curious, do you have any examples?
missedthecue 5y ago
I've seen the same thing. Apparently 33% of people haven't read a book since high school and 42% haven't read a book since college. It's shocking statistics. I myself had a protracted dry spell of book reading but picked it up again about 5 years ago and noticed that it really turned my brain "on" so to speak. My vocabulary increased, but I also felt I was able to store and retrieve information from my brain much quicker.
- derekp7 5y ago
  How do you keep books from completely consuming your free time? For me, whenever I get into a good book I don't want to put it down. I'll read a few hours after my normal bedtime. I'll skip everything I wanted to do over a weekend just to finish a book or book series. Even to the point of reading while in traffic (that I fixed by getting unabridged audio book versions, and switching to that while in traffic and back to paper book when I get home). Then the other issue I have is that since I know a book will consume me, I have a hard time deciding on the next book to read as I don't want to invest a chunk of time getting part way through it, just to find out that a given book is junk. Also I have a number of really good books that are on my abandoned book pile. These are ones that I started reading, go half way through then got back into "life" mode. Then after not reading it for a couple months I have a hard time picking up where I left off (already lost parts of the plot), but I can't start from the beginning either because I already read that part. I have to wait till I mostly forget the parts I read in order to start them again.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    In your situation, it's going to at first being all about discipline and sticking to a schedule. It helps if you have others in your life that you are beholden to, i.e. there are personal commitments that you must sacrifice for. Which, incidentally, makes you a better, more outwardly focused individual.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "I've seen the same thing. Apparently 33% of people haven't read a book since high school and 42% haven't read a book since college. It's shocking statistics." I'm inclined to agree. Do you happen to have a source though?
  - randcraw 5y ago
    Some specific numbers (2018): Who doesn’t read books in America? | The Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-read-books-in-america/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-... And the NEA offers some insights on the downward trend in reading (2007): To Read or Not to Read | The National Endowment for the Arts https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Thanks!
  - notacoward 5y ago
    It's not quite that dire. https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/book-reading-behavior https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/boo... If 53% of all adults read at least one book in the last twelve months (as in 2017), it's still possible that the 33%/42% numbers could also be accurate ... but it's extremely unlikely. It would require an almost complete separation between habitual readers and non-readers, with practically nobody in between who has read books some years but not others. You only have to do that once in your entire life to shift from one column to the other. I rather suspect that the scary numbers are for relatively young adults, which is a non-representative sample of the whole, and that they're being misremembered or misrepresented as pertaining to the entire adult population. P.S. The 53% number is still enough to make me very sad. It's bad. I'm just saying it's probably not that bad.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I can say that I do not fall in that 53%. However, my wife does.
- FYYFFF 5y ago
  Half of Americans cannot read beyond an 8th grade level.
archhn 5y ago
Scary, isn't it. I went on a date once with a regurgiator. Made me feel like I was talking to a drone that takes all direction from queen bee T.V.. We're living in science fiction territory now.
version_five 5y ago
It might also just depend in if you are good friends with someone or not. Anyone I consider a friend I could have a real conversation with about current events, but people revert to orthodoxy when talking to people they are unsure around. Reading definitely helps with critical thinking, but I think most regurgitation just comes from not being your friend. (And I've hypothesized there are actually large social groups that are not really friends. Anyone you would have to consider "political correctness" around for example. I think these larger groups do exist and call each other friends, and just regurgitate at each other. But I think it's that they're afraid of each other, of being denounced as a heretic, not that they don't read)
Thorentis 5y ago
Yep, based on the types of things somebody likes to talk about, the banality of their view of the world, what they simply regurgitate, what sort of nuance they bring (or can pick up on), pretty much allows you to place them in either bucket. And suffice it to say that the former bucket contains the least interesting people to talk with.
- Sohurt00 5y ago
  Anecdotally, as a life long STEM nerd, even smart people are boring. I tire of discussing the potential of a theory; sure let me add that to the pile of a hundred others I heard about this month. How one was able to link two well known math objects by adding a few more of the well known glyphs; no one has ever done that before. When one of you is on the verge of actually replacing relativity, or falsifying entropy, a warp drive, uploading kung fu to my consciousness; sure let’s hear it. And FFS am I tired of listening to startup stories; it’s the new “read my script.” Machine aided reductions of daily life stats is a prosaic story to tell to someone who has been writing software since the 80s.
  - fallat 5y ago
    > I tire of discussing the potential of a theory I guess you hate philosophy or I'm misunderstanding. I derive great pleasure from thinking.
    - Sohurt00 5y ago
      I hate philosophy. I derive great pleasure from making my piano or guitar sound cool, writing my science fiction; experience. I tire of debating the potential of some pet paper should future humans find fit to do something with a theory we can merely acknowledge was written.
      - dwighttk 5y ago
        Sci Fi without philosophy? That sounds unique.
Flankk 5y ago
The two buckets I'd put people in are those who regurgitate mainstream news and those who ignore it completely. In other words, the brainwashed and the braindead. People who read books have become outliers. Social media has destroyed people's attention span.
t_mann 5y ago
What counts as 'reading books'? Textbooks? Self help guides? Tourist guides? Comics? The protocols of the Elders of Zion? It's not all Dostoyevsky and Kant. My hinge: you just divided your friends arbitrarily into 'blue-pilled' and 'red-pilled' and used some metric (probably observed with errors) to make one group look better.
- infamouscow 5y ago
  They've been divided into those with ampliative knowledge and those lacking it.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Yeah, as a rule of thumb for rationality, if you only have two buckets, you haven't thought about the topic critically enough. For books, there's a fairly simple explanation for a mental divide: elitism. Maybe you correlate ability to memorize trivia (which tends to be plentiful in books trying to illustrate some overarching point) with "culturedness". Or maybe the correlation comes from name dropping prolific authors (common in humanities, because certain authors "represent" certain schools of thought). Etc. In my personal experience, the book reading anecdote doesn't really hold because a lot of people I know simply have complex backgrounds (e.g. living large portions of their lives in two or more different countries) and that alone can bring a lot of color to discussions.
  - uoaei 5y ago
    As a rule of thumb for rationality, buckets are mental models -- tools -- and can be treated as such. Drawing a dichotomy, while incomplete, can be useful given the balance between accuracy and parsimony.
  - plaguepilled 5y ago
    This is not rationality, this extrapolation on your part. It would be more rational to have requested sources, or provide your own.
giantg2 5y ago
I know quite a few people who have additional information or don't regurgitate mainstream narratives. You're still unlikely to have a conversation about most issues with them since they tend not to enjoy discussing their views knowing that most potential conversations will just be the narratives they already heard.
hnaccy 5y ago
>Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
DethNinja 5y ago
Past couple of years made me believe that 90% of humanity is actually incapable of critical thinking and actually are not that much different from animals. Most of the humans actually just act on instinct and that’s it. I honestly lost all respect I had for general populace.
- tekknik 5y ago
  “90% of statistics are made up on the spot” - someone
danamit 5y ago
I find so called book read to be boring to talk to. I personally get along with people who watch youtube, discuss in forums, chatrooms, and read wikipedia and similar sources. The best discussions I had where in Discord and 4chan. Some people are extreme there but at least there is an honest curiosity when you discuss. And openness to reach a conclusion or to convince the opposing side of what is wrong. The book readers are kinda parrots who will go on rants about the perspective of some authors, then they will tell you the author is great and give you fun facts about him (he is the first to do this, and he did this and this, and was respected by the high school of something in paris). Also you are (and I am not) in a position to classify people to being critical thinkers or not, being a critical thinker seem to be often than not agreeing with you, or disagreeing with the crown. Hard to argue for what's critical thinking *based on conclusion*. I personally consider flat earthers to be more of a critical thinker that the average person, they have a drive to seek truth, they base that journey on theory and experience. I will be honest the average person has little ways to know that he lives on a sphere, if we exclude the obvious clue that is "why would anyone benefit from lying to us that we live in a sphere", you can't just easily do an experiment that can just prove beyond reason scientifically that we live on a sphere. HN is one of the smuggest communities who think the are the intelligentsia of the world, "excuse me guys we the book reader tribe are smart!!!!!!".
- infamouscow 5y ago
  I'm curious if you've read Kant's essay answering what enlightenment is.[1] [1]: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
preposotter 5y ago
Ink, famously, does not allow lies to be created. Those amoral pixels on the other hand...
buzzard1 5y ago
byecomputer 5y ago
I haven't had that experience. I can think of many people in my life who read books yet have a very conventional, restricted worldview. I also know people who read books and regurgitate them mindlessly. If you put a parrot around different people, it'll learn new phrases -- but it'll still be a parrot. Books are nice, but I'm not sure they determine whether or not you think for yourself.

kryptn 5y ago

I'm curious, do you have any examples?

missedthecue 5y ago

I've seen the same thing. Apparently 33% of people haven't read a book since high school and 42% haven't read a book since college. It's shocking statistics. I myself had a protracted dry spell of book reading but picked it up again about 5 years ago and noticed that it really turned my brain "on" so to speak. My vocabulary increased, but I also felt I was able to store and retrieve information from my brain much quicker.

derekp7 5y ago
How do you keep books from completely consuming your free time? For me, whenever I get into a good book I don't want to put it down. I'll read a few hours after my normal bedtime. I'll skip everything I wanted to do over a weekend just to finish a book or book series. Even to the point of reading while in traffic (that I fixed by getting unabridged audio book versions, and switching to that while in traffic and back to paper book when I get home). Then the other issue I have is that since I know a book will consume me, I have a hard time deciding on the next book to read as I don't want to invest a chunk of time getting part way through it, just to find out that a given book is junk. Also I have a number of really good books that are on my abandoned book pile. These are ones that I started reading, go half way through then got back into "life" mode. Then after not reading it for a couple months I have a hard time picking up where I left off (already lost parts of the plot), but I can't start from the beginning either because I already read that part. I have to wait till I mostly forget the parts I read in order to start them again.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  In your situation, it's going to at first being all about discipline and sticking to a schedule. It helps if you have others in your life that you are beholden to, i.e. there are personal commitments that you must sacrifice for. Which, incidentally, makes you a better, more outwardly focused individual.
giantg2 5y ago
"I've seen the same thing. Apparently 33% of people haven't read a book since high school and 42% haven't read a book since college. It's shocking statistics." I'm inclined to agree. Do you happen to have a source though?
- randcraw 5y ago
  Some specific numbers (2018): Who doesn’t read books in America? | The Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-read-books-in-america/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-... And the NEA offers some insights on the downward trend in reading (2007): To Read or Not to Read | The National Endowment for the Arts https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Thanks!
- notacoward 5y ago
  It's not quite that dire. https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/book-reading-behavior https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/boo... If 53% of all adults read at least one book in the last twelve months (as in 2017), it's still possible that the 33%/42% numbers could also be accurate ... but it's extremely unlikely. It would require an almost complete separation between habitual readers and non-readers, with practically nobody in between who has read books some years but not others. You only have to do that once in your entire life to shift from one column to the other. I rather suspect that the scary numbers are for relatively young adults, which is a non-representative sample of the whole, and that they're being misremembered or misrepresented as pertaining to the entire adult population. P.S. The 53% number is still enough to make me very sad. It's bad. I'm just saying it's probably not that bad.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I can say that I do not fall in that 53%. However, my wife does.
FYYFFF 5y ago
Half of Americans cannot read beyond an 8th grade level.

archhn 5y ago

Scary, isn't it. I went on a date once with a regurgiator. Made me feel like I was talking to a drone that takes all direction from queen bee T.V.. We're living in science fiction territory now.

version_five 5y ago

It might also just depend in if you are good friends with someone or not. Anyone I consider a friend I could have a real conversation with about current events, but people revert to orthodoxy when talking to people they are unsure around. Reading definitely helps with critical thinking, but I think most regurgitation just comes from not being your friend. (And I've hypothesized there are actually large social groups that are not really friends. Anyone you would have to consider "political correctness" around for example. I think these larger groups do exist and call each other friends, and just regurgitate at each other. But I think it's that they're afraid of each other, of being denounced as a heretic, not that they don't read)

Thorentis 5y ago

Yep, based on the types of things somebody likes to talk about, the banality of their view of the world, what they simply regurgitate, what sort of nuance they bring (or can pick up on), pretty much allows you to place them in either bucket. And suffice it to say that the former bucket contains the least interesting people to talk with.

Sohurt00 5y ago
Anecdotally, as a life long STEM nerd, even smart people are boring. I tire of discussing the potential of a theory; sure let me add that to the pile of a hundred others I heard about this month. How one was able to link two well known math objects by adding a few more of the well known glyphs; no one has ever done that before. When one of you is on the verge of actually replacing relativity, or falsifying entropy, a warp drive, uploading kung fu to my consciousness; sure let’s hear it. And FFS am I tired of listening to startup stories; it’s the new “read my script.” Machine aided reductions of daily life stats is a prosaic story to tell to someone who has been writing software since the 80s.
- fallat 5y ago
  > I tire of discussing the potential of a theory I guess you hate philosophy or I'm misunderstanding. I derive great pleasure from thinking.
  - Sohurt00 5y ago
    I hate philosophy. I derive great pleasure from making my piano or guitar sound cool, writing my science fiction; experience. I tire of debating the potential of some pet paper should future humans find fit to do something with a theory we can merely acknowledge was written.
    - dwighttk 5y ago
      Sci Fi without philosophy? That sounds unique.

Flankk 5y ago

The two buckets I'd put people in are those who regurgitate mainstream news and those who ignore it completely. In other words, the brainwashed and the braindead. People who read books have become outliers. Social media has destroyed people's attention span.

t_mann 5y ago

What counts as 'reading books'? Textbooks? Self help guides? Tourist guides? Comics? The protocols of the Elders of Zion? It's not all Dostoyevsky and Kant. My hinge: you just divided your friends arbitrarily into 'blue-pilled' and 'red-pilled' and used some metric (probably observed with errors) to make one group look better.

infamouscow 5y ago
They've been divided into those with ampliative knowledge and those lacking it.
lhorie 5y ago
Yeah, as a rule of thumb for rationality, if you only have two buckets, you haven't thought about the topic critically enough. For books, there's a fairly simple explanation for a mental divide: elitism. Maybe you correlate ability to memorize trivia (which tends to be plentiful in books trying to illustrate some overarching point) with "culturedness". Or maybe the correlation comes from name dropping prolific authors (common in humanities, because certain authors "represent" certain schools of thought). Etc. In my personal experience, the book reading anecdote doesn't really hold because a lot of people I know simply have complex backgrounds (e.g. living large portions of their lives in two or more different countries) and that alone can bring a lot of color to discussions.
- uoaei 5y ago
  As a rule of thumb for rationality, buckets are mental models -- tools -- and can be treated as such. Drawing a dichotomy, while incomplete, can be useful given the balance between accuracy and parsimony.
- plaguepilled 5y ago
  This is not rationality, this extrapolation on your part. It would be more rational to have requested sources, or provide your own.

giantg2 5y ago

I know quite a few people who have additional information or don't regurgitate mainstream narratives. You're still unlikely to have a conversation about most issues with them since they tend not to enjoy discussing their views knowing that most potential conversations will just be the narratives they already heard.

hnaccy 5y ago

>Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

DethNinja 5y ago

Past couple of years made me believe that 90% of humanity is actually incapable of critical thinking and actually are not that much different from animals. Most of the humans actually just act on instinct and that’s it. I honestly lost all respect I had for general populace.

tekknik 5y ago
“90% of statistics are made up on the spot” - someone

danamit 5y ago

I find so called book read to be boring to talk to. I personally get along with people who watch youtube, discuss in forums, chatrooms, and read wikipedia and similar sources. The best discussions I had where in Discord and 4chan. Some people are extreme there but at least there is an honest curiosity when you discuss. And openness to reach a conclusion or to convince the opposing side of what is wrong. The book readers are kinda parrots who will go on rants about the perspective of some authors, then they will tell you the author is great and give you fun facts about him (he is the first to do this, and he did this and this, and was respected by the high school of something in paris). Also you are (and I am not) in a position to classify people to being critical thinkers or not, being a critical thinker seem to be often than not agreeing with you, or disagreeing with the crown. Hard to argue for what's critical thinking *based on conclusion*. I personally consider flat earthers to be more of a critical thinker that the average person, they have a drive to seek truth, they base that journey on theory and experience. I will be honest the average person has little ways to know that he lives on a sphere, if we exclude the obvious clue that is "why would anyone benefit from lying to us that we live in a sphere", you can't just easily do an experiment that can just prove beyond reason scientifically that we live on a sphere. HN is one of the smuggest communities who think the are the intelligentsia of the world, "excuse me guys we the book reader tribe are smart!!!!!!".

infamouscow 5y ago
I'm curious if you've read Kant's essay answering what enlightenment is.[1] [1]: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

preposotter 5y ago

Ink, famously, does not allow lies to be created. Those amoral pixels on the other hand...

buzzard1 5y ago

byecomputer 5y ago

I haven't had that experience. I can think of many people in my life who read books yet have a very conventional, restricted worldview. I also know people who read books and regurgitate them mindlessly. If you put a parrot around different people, it'll learn new phrases -- but it'll still be a parrot. Books are nice, but I'm not sure they determine whether or not you think for yourself.