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Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centur

• estearum 1mo ago
  If there were stupid people back then and there are still stupid people now, wouldn't the interesting thing be to look at what's different?
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  • smokel 1mo ago
    There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill. Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
    • estearum 1mo ago
      > There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill. Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best. > Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful? Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?
• kichimi 1mo ago
  I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube. "Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"
  • mplanchard 1mo ago
    This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.
    • Crabber 1mo ago
      Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?
      • tonyedgecombe 1mo ago
        The fucking article. Or you could imagine a more polite alternative.
      • mikestew 1mo ago
        Sibling comment got the definition, but “TFA” comes from “RTFA”: “read the fucking article”, in response to “yeah, but what about ($THING that was discussed at length in the first paragraph)?” Origins: “RTFM”. “What’s the switch for ls that prints time stamps?” “Read the fucking manual.”
  • Jtariiiii 1mo ago
    The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed. The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.
• api 1mo ago
  The history of Opium is likely more relevant.
• intended 1mo ago
  It is slightly dismissive, since we see degradation of literacy within the past 20 years. https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2026/ https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo... We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes. AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning) The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
  • smokel 1mo ago
    My point is exactly that comparing some variation within 20 years with to a 1000 year period makes little sense. Sure, our collective literacy might be decreasing now, but perhaps it was a bit too high to begin with? Leaders of a country are not the majority. The article makes quite a few of these categorical mistakes. AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.
    • mplanchard 1mo ago
      AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning. Research on broader populations so far is not so hopeful, with most people using it to avoid learning. This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning. As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions. Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement? But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary. And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you. Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare. The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.
• shubhamjain 1mo ago
  I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology. But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too. I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.
  • ljf 1mo ago
    That is also true for me on struggling to complete books, but don't forget when books first become cheap there were letters to the newspapers deploring that young people were reading rather than 'living' by talking with friends or going to the theatre. I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).
    • pwillia7 1mo ago
      Plato was suspicious of writing even lol https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/ https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
  • CrimsonRain 1mo ago
    Re: books Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly. I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page. However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible. It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.
• RobotToaster 1mo ago
  > Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in. Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.
  • smokel 1mo ago
    While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
    • estearum 1mo ago
      You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.
      • smokel 1mo ago
        For all we know social media will emerge across another 6,000 year timeframe. I think we're going in circles :)
        • flufluflufluffy 1mo ago
          The point is that radio, then television, then internet, then smartphones, then AI, each one of which is as impactful on the world as the examples you gave, emerged within a couple hundred years ago years, rather than a couple thousand (and the last few within a couple decades).
• catchnear4321 1mo ago
  > There are still stupid people now. Some even equate attention discipline to intelligence of all things.
• aerhardt 1mo ago
  Like I said in another comment, this famous article by the Atlantic [1] has pretty convincing testimony that kids studying the humanities at elite universities can't read either. I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around. I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
• adamtaylor_13 1mo ago
  I just can't agree with this. Social media has a noticeable, damaging effect on those who consume it constantly. If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you. There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion: Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.
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• GPerson 1mo ago
  It will be kind of surprising if neither global warming nor AI nor nuclear weapons knocks us back to a pre-industrial society in the next 200 years.