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 replace…
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.
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.