Brains are like muscles, they need to be exercised to be strong. I can think of no better metric for that exercise than reading, and children are doing a lot less of it than they used to. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-reading-less-says-new-research.
Superficiality will always be with us; people skimming headlines and only then in media that conform to their confirmation biases. And we have increasing objection to compelling people outside those biases. You mention several.
My generation grew up with books and great music; some of my high school friends went on to play in orchestras. The music kids hear now is disposable as gum wrappers and does nothing to encourage involvement in music; even the wonderful electronic devices that allow people to create music are inevitably paired with assurances that they don't need to learn music theory. I wonder who is going to be playing the contrabassoon in orchestras in thirty years.
Social media are hosting a rebellion against proper English; sentences are becoming passé, distinguishing your and you're is elitist. Anti-intellectualism has always been part of American life but now it's among the young and against superficial thinking the gods themselves contend in vain.
Gender ideology. There was a short column in the NYT, their ethicist responding to a gay man who is part of a group of friends who vacation together. They go to Mexico and have fun. One of their group came out as gay only a few years ago and has now come out as "trans." John is no longer a "gay man," he presents as a woman, and the rest of the group doesn't think he would fit in with their annual vacation anymore. Whether a real woman or one of those new ones.
I don't see anything unreasonable about this. John is not going to fit in with this vacation. But.
The majority of responses in the comments were excoriation of the writer for not using John's new name or gender pronouns, and calling him bigot/racist (??)/transphobic and blah blah blah. The word "deadnaming" appeared in a disturbing percentage of the responses. As if this was the most important thing going on. John's new name was never mentioned; after all, the writer has known him as a gay man named John for years.
John prattles on endlessly about his new "gender identity" and his hormones, and the group is getting tired of every conversation turning around to him. Sound familiar? Can you imagine taking this person along on a sexually adventurous vacation trip? They have not rejected John as a friend, though I can see that coming.
SO many of the responses used the same words and phrases, recitation of a catechism.
John is no longer congruent with the group. He needs to find a group of "trans" friends" and they can talk around the clock about their gender identities and the cruelty and insensitivity of a world that "deadnames" them.
Starting with a quote. 'The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." -Thomas Sowell
The "Idiocracy" had come to pass. I doubt that the average adult has read a book this year. Memes are fun but their replacement of reading is distressing. Even Audible is concerning, where engagement with a book is too much and the content of books are reduced to background noise where parts of it are missed as the mind wanders. Concentration is just too hard for people.
Are intellectuals destroying intellectualism? When ideas cannot be discussed with any depth for fear of being thought of as a racist, bigot, somethingphobe how do we have meaningful discussions?
I could never read a book by listening. My hearing is really bad and interpreting speech is too much of an effort for a spoken book to hold my attention.
It's not just fear of being labeled a bigot. it's the lingering effects of postmodernism; any kind of negative value judgment is seen as hubris, as "just like the religious right."
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity
I'm almost done reading a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." The author, one Nicholas Carr, makes a decent case that a lotta problems are caused by outsourcing our memory to the 'Net. By being able to Google everything and pick up three or four-minute snippets of information, we lose the capability to think in depth.
And by seeing this as the *apotheosis* of processing information. Yeah, can *process* it all right. But I'm not sure how having "the attention span of a gnat" could possibly be *worth* it.
Another point. Back when I had to go to a library to find information I had to riffle through books and encyclopedias and by the time I found the facts I was looking for I had run into a lot of other new ones along the way.
Many times in my life, in libraries and bookstores or even in an unread book in my own collection, I would randomly read a paragraph that started me thinking for days. Lee Smolin got me reading real physics; Karl Popper got me thinking about much deeper ramifications of the Uncertainty Principle. And that's science alone. The opening to Tale of Two Cities fer chrissake.
Brains are like muscles, they need to be exercised to be strong. I can think of no better metric for that exercise than reading, and children are doing a lot less of it than they used to. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-reading-less-says-new-research.
So are adults.
Superficiality will always be with us; people skimming headlines and only then in media that conform to their confirmation biases. And we have increasing objection to compelling people outside those biases. You mention several.
My generation grew up with books and great music; some of my high school friends went on to play in orchestras. The music kids hear now is disposable as gum wrappers and does nothing to encourage involvement in music; even the wonderful electronic devices that allow people to create music are inevitably paired with assurances that they don't need to learn music theory. I wonder who is going to be playing the contrabassoon in orchestras in thirty years.
Social media are hosting a rebellion against proper English; sentences are becoming passé, distinguishing your and you're is elitist. Anti-intellectualism has always been part of American life but now it's among the young and against superficial thinking the gods themselves contend in vain.
Gender ideology. There was a short column in the NYT, their ethicist responding to a gay man who is part of a group of friends who vacation together. They go to Mexico and have fun. One of their group came out as gay only a few years ago and has now come out as "trans." John is no longer a "gay man," he presents as a woman, and the rest of the group doesn't think he would fit in with their annual vacation anymore. Whether a real woman or one of those new ones.
I don't see anything unreasonable about this. John is not going to fit in with this vacation. But.
The majority of responses in the comments were excoriation of the writer for not using John's new name or gender pronouns, and calling him bigot/racist (??)/transphobic and blah blah blah. The word "deadnaming" appeared in a disturbing percentage of the responses. As if this was the most important thing going on. John's new name was never mentioned; after all, the writer has known him as a gay man named John for years.
John prattles on endlessly about his new "gender identity" and his hormones, and the group is getting tired of every conversation turning around to him. Sound familiar? Can you imagine taking this person along on a sexually adventurous vacation trip? They have not rejected John as a friend, though I can see that coming.
SO many of the responses used the same words and phrases, recitation of a catechism.
John is no longer congruent with the group. He needs to find a group of "trans" friends" and they can talk around the clock about their gender identities and the cruelty and insensitivity of a world that "deadnames" them.
Starting with a quote. 'The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." -Thomas Sowell
The "Idiocracy" had come to pass. I doubt that the average adult has read a book this year. Memes are fun but their replacement of reading is distressing. Even Audible is concerning, where engagement with a book is too much and the content of books are reduced to background noise where parts of it are missed as the mind wanders. Concentration is just too hard for people.
Are intellectuals destroying intellectualism? When ideas cannot be discussed with any depth for fear of being thought of as a racist, bigot, somethingphobe how do we have meaningful discussions?
I could never read a book by listening. My hearing is really bad and interpreting speech is too much of an effort for a spoken book to hold my attention.
It's not just fear of being labeled a bigot. it's the lingering effects of postmodernism; any kind of negative value judgment is seen as hubris, as "just like the religious right."
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity
TY. Love Sowell...
I'm almost done reading a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." The author, one Nicholas Carr, makes a decent case that a lotta problems are caused by outsourcing our memory to the 'Net. By being able to Google everything and pick up three or four-minute snippets of information, we lose the capability to think in depth.
And by seeing this as the *apotheosis* of processing information. Yeah, can *process* it all right. But I'm not sure how having "the attention span of a gnat" could possibly be *worth* it.
Another point. Back when I had to go to a library to find information I had to riffle through books and encyclopedias and by the time I found the facts I was looking for I had run into a lot of other new ones along the way.
Many times in my life, in libraries and bookstores or even in an unread book in my own collection, I would randomly read a paragraph that started me thinking for days. Lee Smolin got me reading real physics; Karl Popper got me thinking about much deeper ramifications of the Uncertainty Principle. And that's science alone. The opening to Tale of Two Cities fer chrissake.
None of this happens with Google.
When did John Horton Conway die? 2020. Done.
TYTY. Yeah, sometimes I get like that. That's half the fun of reading, to me anyway.
Quite a number of my books were not something that I was looking for, but they caught my attention in a bookstore.