Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history?
I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.
I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.
An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.
> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?
Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently understand things gestures generally than someone who gets everything from articles online.
I think the major difference is that this article describes some meta concept. Despite being abstract its very concrete. If 2 people read something that is fantasy or even describing a physical process like wood carving. Despite reading the same thing both parties have an entirely different picture of what happened. The clothes on the people are different, the building they occupy is different, the wood you are carving is different, the tools you use are different. These difference are actually the most increasing details which your brain fills in, and this is something completely different from when you watch TV. All the details are filled its concrete and non-abstract. It can still be a compeling story or piece of art but often people are are much worst artist and visual things rarely capture all the things your brain can fill in for detail that make something cohesive. And the details they fill in are often details your brain finds mundane and ignores entirely.
I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).
I think that can be true and probably is, but it seems like an over simplification. If you spend 14 hours a day reading Wikipedia and studying it, say working math equations, cross referencing sources, etc… is that really going to make you understand less than someone who reads enormously long but low quality romance novels for the same number of hours?
It would only be an oversimplification if they had claimed that every book reader understands more than every online reader, regardless of subject matter. They didn't. Plus, in your example, this hypothetical online reader has already acquired the capacities that books are supposed to help develop, and he might be closer to a book writer.
A more concrete example: SBF infamously said he doesn’t read books. While he was obviously not very bright in many ways, I’m certain there are heavy book readers who are far less bright or informed. I know, because I’ve met them. My only point is that there exists a bias towards books that is sometimes but often not warranted.
How could less correlated reading, no matter how high the quality, possibly compare to a solid book - in use of time or depth of impact?
The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.
Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.
If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, with lower correlations of who finds them, reads them, and when, the page count would have to increase 10x - 100x. The setups and redundancy would be immense.
Books also get to explore many perspectives on the same important ideas. Which is not redundancy. It is the difference between recognizing a good idea and understanding it.
Feeling an epiphany vs. absorbing its implications. Awareness vs. fluency.
There is also a weird, robust mortality relationship where book readers live longer than periodical readers "regardless of gender, health, wealth, or education" [1]. In those studies, the threshold was 30 minutes of book reading a day.
While this is just a rule of thumb, I consider moderate exercise, reading, and socializing to be roughly equivalent in positive health benefits. I try to get a little bit of each every day, and then try to have longer sessions of each once or twice a week.
Meh, if the book is bad you fall asleep in 15-30 min. If the book is good you put it down when you finish it and notice it’s morning already. Easy enough.
Talking about fiction read for entertainment of course. HN does tend to assume books are only for learning something.
Even a longer online article or news story is very short compared to a book.
Reading a book is a bit more like getting into a "flow" state writing code (although, with LLMs now doing most of the writing, that may not happen any more either). You become immersed in the prose, getting all the characters and the roles they play in the story into your mental context. You tune out the rest of the world to some degree, lose track of passing time, and if you are interrupted it feels like a jolt and it takes a while to get back into that state.
First one I highly recommend. Second one I'm reading now, so far it's.. okay. The ideas in the book resonate with me but the writing is poor. The first book (Non-Things) talks about our relation to the digital versus the physical, and it convinced me to stop using my phone as much.
This is purely my experience but the difference between reading a good book vs consuming any other kind of media has been night vs day. I don't think any long article has thoroughly altered my perception about something important in my life. Certainly no Instagram reel has. Short form has been mostly useless, long form has sometimes been useful. But multiple books have had a life-changing impact on me over the course of my life.
I read a lot of books in my 20s. Many were forgettable, but a couple totally realigned my view of reality and what was possible and I went off to create a highly unconventional life because of them.
I then stopped reading books in my 30s - that time mostly got spent reading web articles and social media instead. This was a stagnant period of my life in many ways.
In my 40s I started to wonder if there might be a connection and I started making a conscious effort to start reading books again. Surprise surprise, a few years later I'm experiencing one of the most creative and productive periods of my life.
A great book will take a big idea and expound on it from multiple angles. It'll build both a logical and an emotional case for looking at the world differently. For me at least this type of shift in thinking takes reading multiple chapters worth of good arguments get it fully embedded in my brain.
Remember, the author of a great book may spend _years_ researching it before he even gets started on the writing part. The best books are next level stuff and I feel no other medium compares.
There will of course be many books that don't have this impact and end up being throwaways. I will buy them and if they aren't hooking me I simply don't finish them.
I think this all applies equally to fiction and non-fiction.
I think there might be some people out there who've experienced this degree of personal change from interacting with certain online communities. That's the only analogue I can think of. For me though it's books.
> "Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?"
I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).
> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?
The difference is gigantic. All the best writers and most important writers are dead and aren't posting comments on Twitter or writing articles for blogs or newspapers.
You could ask yourself similarly if there's any value in listening to any other music than what they are playing on the Top 40 radio channel.
Paul Graham recently: The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
> You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
I'd like this to be true, but Socrates immediately comes to mind as a perfect counter example of someone who was opposed to writing and was arguably one of the greatest thinkers ever.
Technically we don’t know what Socrates actually said, we just know what Plato has him saying. Very plausible that Socrates was rambling in person, and Plato cleaned up his thoughts in the process of writing them.
> I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve.
This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.
His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.
My favorite part of How to Read a Book is how it classifies books into books worth skimming over, books worth reading each word exactly once, and books worith studying and actively engaging with in depth.
How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.
I’ve read it a few times both on my own and with my kids. I could maybe buy 50-60% of the length would be ideal, but not 10%.
Ironically, one of the points made in the book—and close to your point—is that even in the greatest book of all time there are passages that are more and less worthwhile. The art of being a good reader is identifying the worthwhile and going over it slowly (maybe even rereading it) and identifying the less worthy and going over it quick.
The nice thing about spending more time with HTRAB is it forces you to think about reading. That’s a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.
I feel for this author. Not because of his attention span, but rather that his whole life has been lived trying to conform to someone else's ideals. Can't read in middle or high school because of what peers would think. Couldn't read in college for what his dad said that he should be doing. Can't read in your professional life because it's 'childish'. Now he feels 'obligated' to read because it's part of Bourdieauian ideals?
I think the author should take a long hard look at himself, and decide for himself what his ideals are that he wants to live by. Reading even though you don't like it isn't evidence of sophisitication, it is evidence of stupidity.
The easiest way to counter it is just leave your phone at home and take a book and go to a public bench and read. You will quickly condition your brain to no longer need to constantly be looking at a screen to be happy.
Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
>Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.
People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.
If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.
The simplest version of this, which I did myself, is just to have less food in the house. Stop buying snacks, only get items you have a planned meal for, and you spend a lot less willpower resisting the temptation to grab stuff while you're already in the kitchen or etc.
It's harder to modify what restaurants and online orders are available to you, but maybe you can work up to blocking or uninstalling those apps or something?
A big thing that helped me was just to start cooking/preparing most of my meals myself. Restaurant portions are usually too big and they load up the food with sugar and sodium to make you eat more of it and still want dessert.
It's easy to learn how to make an interesting variety of simple dishes with a relatively small number of staple ingredients. It doesn't end up taking more time than going out or waiting on DoorDash.
Recapitulating an old comment. Start by quitting all algorithmic, ad-driven social media.
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over for Facebook over a decade ago:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook (read: your main social media) app on your phone; then
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps (read: all other social media) on your phone; next
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account.
But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been about a decade since I've cared to log into Facebook. Last time I tried, it felt like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox more than anything compelling.)
Screen addiction is a funny term that made realize that it’s the perfect term for this.
I remember in a recent city blackout, me and other people , that didn't have internet or comms, would instinctively pull out their phones and open apps knowingly that there is no connection.
Not in a religious way, just have a no screens day every week, once a month, or just once.
You can get by one day without texting, looking for directions, getting an answer from google, ordering takeout, etc. etc. etc. Set yourself a boundary, no phones unless there's a fire or somebody needs to go to the hospital and stick to it. Make a schedule.
My brain was already perfectly conditioned not to pay attention to screens 30 years ago.
Now my JOB is to look at screens, I am confronted with screens in public and I am expected to be responsive on my mobile screen device both in social life and at work.
Sure, I can employ all sorts of techniques to curb screen addiction but it is the same issue as all these weight loss programs. The Yo-Yo-Effect with screens is unavoidable no matter what state of mind you reach. I know people who take week long vacations in silent monasteries with immense benefit to their mental health. That benefit is curb stomped by modern society within days of their return to "normal" life!
I believe we should.. step back a bit, and agree on what we mean by "reading books", vs "other things on a screen"; you all mean the tension between reading cumulative attention-intensive material versus discontinuous context-resetting material, right?
Interesting, I struggle to read. I always have. But I genuinely enjoyed it. Few years back I told a colleague that by the time I reach the end of paragraph I forget how it started. He told me sounds like a learning difficulty. So I did a test, thinking I was dyslexic. It turns out I have ADHD with particularly bad short term memory.
Anyways my question for everyone here, how do you read with ADHD? How do you over come reading the same passage multiple time?
Fix your ADHD.
It certainly comes with constant fatigue.
It becomes clear that ADHD, like autism, is related to a lack of energy for the brain, and disappears when enough energy is available.
If you feel too tired to focus, if you think you might need to sleep more than others, have the need for naps and so on, go consult a sleep clinic, get tested for all kinds of conditions, and find and fix the root cause.
Ritalin won't fix the root cause and depending on how tired you are, will rather deplete your energy levels than improve your status in the long run. Ritalin gives you an illusion, not a remedy.
Causes of fatigue can be a chronic inflammatory state, some immune reactions triggered too often...
Do you have allergies? Rashes when you eat some food? Trembling hands? Some skin problems? Hearing loss or tinnitus? Are you abnormally tired after sports? Do you have abnormal cramps after sports or drinking alcohol, or when not sleeping enough? Regular teeth health issues? Do you have a sensitive vague nerve? Did you faint more than other people in the course of your life? Does your body need more time to heal? Do you feel dizziness when standing up? Have you always had the impression that you actually aren't that stable on your feet, even while actually practising a lot of sports? What about headaches and migraines?
When you work, have you specialised in some tasks that are/feel quite systematic for you? Are social interactions or other tasks that require new analysis exhausting for you? These are signs that you optimise your energy expenditure by focusing on tasks that barely require you to think with much energy.
Lack of energy is a very good reason for the brain to avoid using energy for its executive function, the function that is actually impaired in people with ADHD. It's normal, and trying to fix that feels exhausting, which is why people with ADHD avoid spending that energy.
The executive function is preliminary to focusing with other parts of the brain. If it's impaired, the brain won't even try to focus with other parts for the actual work. Two problems solved at once. Twice the energy spared.
Find the root cause of your ADHD (which often is just a symptom) and fix it.
I think constantly checking if you can recall the last paragraph is a bad habit. It not only requires mental effort, it also breaks your flow.
I have ADHD myself, and I advise you to always keep reading. Don't stop and think about what things meant, don't recall the important events at the end of a paragraph or chapter, none of that. Just keep reading.
If you really feel like you didn't 'get it', go back 3 chapters. But reread it without stopping.
Personally, for any kind of serious reading, I have to go to a place/room with zero opportunities for distraction. No noise, no surrounding commotion, even slightly dimming lights helps. My retention rate drops significantly if there are any distractions.
For lighter reading or docs, I’ve got to take almost diagrammatic-like notes. whiteboard, paper/pen, or ipad work best for me - typed notes don’t work well. I may not even revisit the notes later, but actually writing them helps retention.
If I’m out of luck and must read in a non conducive environment, just resolving that I’ll have to re-read once or twice is the only way. Not aware of any magic solution unfortunately.
I just speed ahead, and I always retained more than I thought I did. If I keep going, eventually I can reach a kind of flow. It doesn't matter if I missed bits here or there.
Or, you could try the opposite, and slow down. It sounds like torture, but eventually, it will become habitual.
I think you can compare it to watching a movie. You won't recall at the end what color jacket the character was wearing, or what the name of the victim was, but you still get the movie. Even though the jacket-color might be significant in someway (like being the same color like the monster the character would become or something). It's normal and expected that a single viewing/reading will not give you all the insights.
Just like a movie, if I really like it, I could decide to read it again, and discover things I didn't get the first time around. But there is no requirement to spot every detail the first time.
>> He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure
It’s very clear that op’s father doesn’t value education first nor does he care to provide that influence to his children.
Is reading morally superior? It seems like greater society (with the apps) is rapidly changing back to an oral culture which seems to be humanity’s default setting.
For a long time learning required a primary attention of a person. Usually a monopoly attention. You can't read printed text and do something else in parallel (fidgeting doesn't count). Radio and TV facilitated background viewing and listening but there weren't many options to personalize those. And then IT revolution happened and humanity discovered that they can do something as a primary attention task and "learn" in background by listening to a narrated educational media. And with the invention of speed-up, those people are now debating is x2 speed-up too slow, and just how fast can they go while still discerning words.
it's my personal hot-take, but I think that a majority of those background listeners are doing performative "learning" and aren't learning anything really. It's just to brag once a year that they have "read" 100+ books in a year and post a wall of covers or a number on their social network feed.
Basically, books aren't morally superior media than anything else really. But focused and monopoly attention dedicated to some media is morally superior to a performative background "learning". Books simply eliminate even a possibility of reading them in background.
I hate these discussions on HN. Unless we first agree on what 'good' and 'bad' are, this question is basically nonsense. In any case, what you choose to do on your own in your free time has basically no moral or ethical impact whatsoever.
> He obviously meant "is choosing to spend your time reading morally superior", though
Sure. I'm answering it by another measure. Killing is, ceteris paribus, morally inferior to not killing. I'd argue a psychopath is henceforth morally debilitated despite it not really being their "fault" that they're born without empathy. This, in turn, helps me conclude that a murderer is, in fact, doing wrong.
Same here. Someone who can't read isn't inherently less morally capable than someone who can. What reading gives one is the capacity to gain a better understanding of ethics and morals. So I'd guess folks who read books are, on average, more intelligent and at least seeking to conduct themselves in a more moral fashion than someone who doesn't. But that doesn't make spending time reading morally superior to some other activity.
That reading gives the capacity to gain a better understanding, doesn't mean that all readers use it that way. The act of reading itself doesn't make the people more willing to be more understanding. Someone who cannot read could have the same desire for understanding and might choose to engage that desire by talking to people in person. The fact that the latter doesn't read, doesn't make him less morally superior.
The only correlation that reading and intelligence have is that intelligent people find it easier to read, and therefore enjoy reading more, and therefore read more. It's not the other way around.
Yes. Because its less information that "Oral" which is just video content.
Text is raw information. Viewing a person speaking is Information + social and context clues. Clues that humans find it very hard to resist. We are social mammals built to fathom our place in the hierarchy by listening to the noises and expressions of other mammals. People will tell you that they love science or philosophy or something, but often what they actually love is the person telling them about it. With monetised content being the norm these days, people are exploiting these side channels while handing out sub par information. And it works. You only need to look at the flat earth movement, almost entirely built on video content, to see the truth in this. People aren't signing up to be flat earthers because the information is valid, they are signing up because they like the people giving them the faulty information.
No we would absolutely be better off going back to reading. Its much healthier.
I found Amazon's Whispersync (audiobook + ebook synced) helpful for keeping me engaged in books in the smartphone era.
This is a plug, but I made my own epub + text to speech reader for iOS for keeping myself engaged in reading, and have been reading/listening to classics such as Crime and Punishment this way: https://heard.quest/
A few months ago I spent an entire Saturday reading a long book (Underworld by Don DeLillo) deliberately with my phone off. I walked around, went to a restaurant, sat on a bench in the park, all with just the book. It was one of the most “grounded” days I’ve had in years, and I felt like I noticed dozens of things about the place I live that I hadn’t noticed before.
Ironically it was the exact day that the recent Iran war started. But I didn’t find out about it until late at night, when I turned my phone back on.
I dropped Twitter for Lent this year, just in time for the fighting to pick up. Being stuck with slow, oversimplified (and likely propagandistic) news coverage instead of the usual OSINT accounts, (likely fake) firsthand reports, and bad-but-fun hot takes was frustrating for a bit .
(I still haven't gotten back on, and I'm much happier for it)
I deeply resonate with this. Even when I began reading, I felt myself wanting to jump away into my email or some other needless task. After getting through the premise, it felt almost like a challenge to read the entire blog. Very well done.
at work we started making a libary with books we want to read to keep us sane and adopting good and old practices in the world of ai. its very easy to get blind nowdays but reading have helped me alot
Most people never really developed the habit of reading.
They sure did consume the newspaper but that has now been replaced with social media. The medium changed but the habits did not.
I think author is having an existential crisis instead of the world as he wrote.
The addiction of these mediums is undeniable. But let’s not lie to ourselves; only a few people liked to read. Anything that requires deep concentration often needs incentives or real consequences to make it more compelling.
The only way out of this is elimination of the medium itself.
You wouldn’t want a cocaine addict to carry a bag of cocaine in his pocket. But this is what’s happening to us all.
Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history?
I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.
I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.
An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.
> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?
Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently understand things gestures generally than someone who gets everything from articles online.
I think the major difference is that this article describes some meta concept. Despite being abstract its very concrete. If 2 people read something that is fantasy or even describing a physical process like wood carving. Despite reading the same thing both parties have an entirely different picture of what happened. The clothes on the people are different, the building they occupy is different, the wood you are carving is different, the tools you use are different. These difference are actually the most increasing details which your brain fills in, and this is something completely different from when you watch TV. All the details are filled its concrete and non-abstract. It can still be a compeling story or piece of art but often people are are much worst artist and visual things rarely capture all the things your brain can fill in for detail that make something cohesive. And the details they fill in are often details your brain finds mundane and ignores entirely.
I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).
I think that can be true and probably is, but it seems like an over simplification. If you spend 14 hours a day reading Wikipedia and studying it, say working math equations, cross referencing sources, etc… is that really going to make you understand less than someone who reads enormously long but low quality romance novels for the same number of hours?
It would only be an oversimplification if they had claimed that every book reader understands more than every online reader, regardless of subject matter. They didn't. Plus, in your example, this hypothetical online reader has already acquired the capacities that books are supposed to help develop, and he might be closer to a book writer.
A more concrete example: SBF infamously said he doesn’t read books. While he was obviously not very bright in many ways, I’m certain there are heavy book readers who are far less bright or informed. I know, because I’ve met them. My only point is that there exists a bias towards books that is sometimes but often not warranted.
How could less correlated reading, no matter how high the quality, possibly compare to a solid book - in use of time or depth of impact?
The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.
Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.
If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, with lower correlations of who finds them, reads them, and when, the page count would have to increase 10x - 100x. The setups and redundancy would be immense.
Books also get to explore many perspectives on the same important ideas. Which is not redundancy. It is the difference between recognizing a good idea and understanding it.
Feeling an epiphany vs. absorbing its implications. Awareness vs. fluency.
I’m not familiar with the research but I will say that conclusion “feels” right to me.
Have they found a modern day metric that we should all be hunting in our quest for reading health? A literary equivalent to the daily 10,000 steps?
Maybe 10,000 words!
There is also a weird, robust mortality relationship where book readers live longer than periodical readers "regardless of gender, health, wealth, or education" [1]. In those studies, the threshold was 30 minutes of book reading a day.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/
While this is just a rule of thumb, I consider moderate exercise, reading, and socializing to be roughly equivalent in positive health benefits. I try to get a little bit of each every day, and then try to have longer sessions of each once or twice a week.
Ten thousand books in an 80-year lifetime would mean finishing one book every three days. That's aggressive, but entirely achievable.
Meh, if the book is bad you fall asleep in 15-30 min. If the book is good you put it down when you finish it and notice it’s morning already. Easy enough.
Talking about fiction read for entertainment of course. HN does tend to assume books are only for learning something.
Even a longer online article or news story is very short compared to a book.
Reading a book is a bit more like getting into a "flow" state writing code (although, with LLMs now doing most of the writing, that may not happen any more either). You become immersed in the prose, getting all the characters and the roles they play in the story into your mental context. You tune out the rest of the world to some degree, lose track of passing time, and if you are interrupted it feels like a jolt and it takes a while to get back into that state.
I didn't read Peak Mind, but two books that are somewhat in the same vain (based on your description) are:
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59794522-non-things
2. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/236849376-attensity
First one I highly recommend. Second one I'm reading now, so far it's.. okay. The ideas in the book resonate with me but the writing is poor. The first book (Non-Things) talks about our relation to the digital versus the physical, and it convinced me to stop using my phone as much.
This is purely my experience but the difference between reading a good book vs consuming any other kind of media has been night vs day. I don't think any long article has thoroughly altered my perception about something important in my life. Certainly no Instagram reel has. Short form has been mostly useless, long form has sometimes been useful. But multiple books have had a life-changing impact on me over the course of my life.
I read a lot of books in my 20s. Many were forgettable, but a couple totally realigned my view of reality and what was possible and I went off to create a highly unconventional life because of them.
I then stopped reading books in my 30s - that time mostly got spent reading web articles and social media instead. This was a stagnant period of my life in many ways.
In my 40s I started to wonder if there might be a connection and I started making a conscious effort to start reading books again. Surprise surprise, a few years later I'm experiencing one of the most creative and productive periods of my life.
A great book will take a big idea and expound on it from multiple angles. It'll build both a logical and an emotional case for looking at the world differently. For me at least this type of shift in thinking takes reading multiple chapters worth of good arguments get it fully embedded in my brain.
Remember, the author of a great book may spend _years_ researching it before he even gets started on the writing part. The best books are next level stuff and I feel no other medium compares.
There will of course be many books that don't have this impact and end up being throwaways. I will buy them and if they aren't hooking me I simply don't finish them.
I think this all applies equally to fiction and non-fiction.
I think there might be some people out there who've experienced this degree of personal change from interacting with certain online communities. That's the only analogue I can think of. For me though it's books.
> "Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?"
I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).
And at a meta level, every medium of communication shapes its receiver as well (think about the dumbing down effect of TV vs a book).
> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?
The difference is gigantic. All the best writers and most important writers are dead and aren't posting comments on Twitter or writing articles for blogs or newspapers.
You could ask yourself similarly if there's any value in listening to any other music than what they are playing on the Top 40 radio channel.
Books are generally far higher quality texts too. The really good articles get republished as books, think about that.
This is a great question. I would love to know the answer to this as well. +1
Paul Graham recently: The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
https://x.com/paulg/status/2075980847228801132
> You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
I'd like this to be true, but Socrates immediately comes to mind as a perfect counter example of someone who was opposed to writing and was arguably one of the greatest thinkers ever.
Technically we don’t know what Socrates actually said, we just know what Plato has him saying. Very plausible that Socrates was rambling in person, and Plato cleaned up his thoughts in the process of writing them.
> I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve.
This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.
His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.
My favorite part of How to Read a Book is how it classifies books into books worth skimming over, books worth reading each word exactly once, and books worith studying and actively engaging with in depth.
How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.
I’ve read it a few times both on my own and with my kids. I could maybe buy 50-60% of the length would be ideal, but not 10%.
Ironically, one of the points made in the book—and close to your point—is that even in the greatest book of all time there are passages that are more and less worthwhile. The art of being a good reader is identifying the worthwhile and going over it slowly (maybe even rereading it) and identifying the less worthy and going over it quick.
The nice thing about spending more time with HTRAB is it forces you to think about reading. That’s a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.
I feel for this author. Not because of his attention span, but rather that his whole life has been lived trying to conform to someone else's ideals. Can't read in middle or high school because of what peers would think. Couldn't read in college for what his dad said that he should be doing. Can't read in your professional life because it's 'childish'. Now he feels 'obligated' to read because it's part of Bourdieauian ideals?
I think the author should take a long hard look at himself, and decide for himself what his ideals are that he wants to live by. Reading even though you don't like it isn't evidence of sophisitication, it is evidence of stupidity.
Screen addiction is a thing for me, I'm addicted to my phone computer and tv and i don't know how to manage it.
I know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff
The easiest way to counter it is just leave your phone at home and take a book and go to a public bench and read. You will quickly condition your brain to no longer need to constantly be looking at a screen to be happy.
Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
Even when at home I try to keep my phone in my nightstand drawer. Sure I can go grab it, but that bookshelf is a lot closer to my lounge areas.
>Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.
People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.
If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.
The simplest version of this, which I did myself, is just to have less food in the house. Stop buying snacks, only get items you have a planned meal for, and you spend a lot less willpower resisting the temptation to grab stuff while you're already in the kitchen or etc.
It's harder to modify what restaurants and online orders are available to you, but maybe you can work up to blocking or uninstalling those apps or something?
A big thing that helped me was just to start cooking/preparing most of my meals myself. Restaurant portions are usually too big and they load up the food with sugar and sodium to make you eat more of it and still want dessert.
It's easy to learn how to make an interesting variety of simple dishes with a relatively small number of staple ingredients. It doesn't end up taking more time than going out or waiting on DoorDash.
Recapitulating an old comment. Start by quitting all algorithmic, ad-driven social media.
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over for Facebook over a decade ago:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook (read: your main social media) app on your phone; then
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps (read: all other social media) on your phone; next
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account.
But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been about a decade since I've cared to log into Facebook. Last time I tried, it felt like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox more than anything compelling.)
Set small achievable goals and hold yourself accountable.
Screen addiction is a funny term that made realize that it’s the perfect term for this.
I remember in a recent city blackout, me and other people , that didn't have internet or comms, would instinctively pull out their phones and open apps knowingly that there is no connection.
I wonder what’s this about??
Observe the sabbath.
Not in a religious way, just have a no screens day every week, once a month, or just once.
You can get by one day without texting, looking for directions, getting an answer from google, ordering takeout, etc. etc. etc. Set yourself a boundary, no phones unless there's a fire or somebody needs to go to the hospital and stick to it. Make a schedule.
I recently realized this when I started a 30 day „digital declutter“ and banned myself from social media, YouTube etc for 30 days.
It’s interesting how ruling out those options of spending my time made me default to reading more.
I also noticed I had a much better attention span for long-form movies (2+ hours used to be hard for paying attention to one thing).
It does feel like reading books is one of the best activities for reconditioning your brain in the wake of screen/dopamine addiction
My brain was already perfectly conditioned not to pay attention to screens 30 years ago.
Now my JOB is to look at screens, I am confronted with screens in public and I am expected to be responsive on my mobile screen device both in social life and at work.
Sure, I can employ all sorts of techniques to curb screen addiction but it is the same issue as all these weight loss programs. The Yo-Yo-Effect with screens is unavoidable no matter what state of mind you reach. I know people who take week long vacations in silent monasteries with immense benefit to their mental health. That benefit is curb stomped by modern society within days of their return to "normal" life!
I believe we should.. step back a bit, and agree on what we mean by "reading books", vs "other things on a screen"; you all mean the tension between reading cumulative attention-intensive material versus discontinuous context-resetting material, right?
Interesting, I struggle to read. I always have. But I genuinely enjoyed it. Few years back I told a colleague that by the time I reach the end of paragraph I forget how it started. He told me sounds like a learning difficulty. So I did a test, thinking I was dyslexic. It turns out I have ADHD with particularly bad short term memory. Anyways my question for everyone here, how do you read with ADHD? How do you over come reading the same passage multiple time?
Fix your ADHD. It certainly comes with constant fatigue. It becomes clear that ADHD, like autism, is related to a lack of energy for the brain, and disappears when enough energy is available. If you feel too tired to focus, if you think you might need to sleep more than others, have the need for naps and so on, go consult a sleep clinic, get tested for all kinds of conditions, and find and fix the root cause. Ritalin won't fix the root cause and depending on how tired you are, will rather deplete your energy levels than improve your status in the long run. Ritalin gives you an illusion, not a remedy. Causes of fatigue can be a chronic inflammatory state, some immune reactions triggered too often...
Do you have allergies? Rashes when you eat some food? Trembling hands? Some skin problems? Hearing loss or tinnitus? Are you abnormally tired after sports? Do you have abnormal cramps after sports or drinking alcohol, or when not sleeping enough? Regular teeth health issues? Do you have a sensitive vague nerve? Did you faint more than other people in the course of your life? Does your body need more time to heal? Do you feel dizziness when standing up? Have you always had the impression that you actually aren't that stable on your feet, even while actually practising a lot of sports? What about headaches and migraines? When you work, have you specialised in some tasks that are/feel quite systematic for you? Are social interactions or other tasks that require new analysis exhausting for you? These are signs that you optimise your energy expenditure by focusing on tasks that barely require you to think with much energy.
Lack of energy is a very good reason for the brain to avoid using energy for its executive function, the function that is actually impaired in people with ADHD. It's normal, and trying to fix that feels exhausting, which is why people with ADHD avoid spending that energy.
The executive function is preliminary to focusing with other parts of the brain. If it's impaired, the brain won't even try to focus with other parts for the actual work. Two problems solved at once. Twice the energy spared.
Find the root cause of your ADHD (which often is just a symptom) and fix it.
You seem to have thought about this. Would Creatine help?
I think constantly checking if you can recall the last paragraph is a bad habit. It not only requires mental effort, it also breaks your flow.
I have ADHD myself, and I advise you to always keep reading. Don't stop and think about what things meant, don't recall the important events at the end of a paragraph or chapter, none of that. Just keep reading.
If you really feel like you didn't 'get it', go back 3 chapters. But reread it without stopping.
Personally, for any kind of serious reading, I have to go to a place/room with zero opportunities for distraction. No noise, no surrounding commotion, even slightly dimming lights helps. My retention rate drops significantly if there are any distractions. For lighter reading or docs, I’ve got to take almost diagrammatic-like notes. whiteboard, paper/pen, or ipad work best for me - typed notes don’t work well. I may not even revisit the notes later, but actually writing them helps retention. If I’m out of luck and must read in a non conducive environment, just resolving that I’ll have to re-read once or twice is the only way. Not aware of any magic solution unfortunately.
I just speed ahead, and I always retained more than I thought I did. If I keep going, eventually I can reach a kind of flow. It doesn't matter if I missed bits here or there.
Or, you could try the opposite, and slow down. It sounds like torture, but eventually, it will become habitual.
Can you read dense novels with this? I feel like you'd miss subtleties, but grasp the overall story or simpler books.
I think you can compare it to watching a movie. You won't recall at the end what color jacket the character was wearing, or what the name of the victim was, but you still get the movie. Even though the jacket-color might be significant in someway (like being the same color like the monster the character would become or something). It's normal and expected that a single viewing/reading will not give you all the insights.
Just like a movie, if I really like it, I could decide to read it again, and discover things I didn't get the first time around. But there is no requirement to spot every detail the first time.
I read Anna Karenina pretty fast. And the Power Broker. I'm a fast reader in general.
I take my meds (ritalin) before serious reading, and it usually works
Audiobooks sped up to ~2x or so, but you usually have to build up to that speed.
There are also exercises which help develop short term memory like n-back training for which there are many phone apps.
Oh you don't zone out?
Try going for a walk when listening to an audiobook. When I do that I rarely zone out. When I don't I nearly always zone out.
The speed helps with that.
Also doing something mindless helps. The dishes, the laundry, moderate exercise.
I can't pay attention to most audiobooks at 1x, I get bored between words.
>> He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure
It’s very clear that op’s father doesn’t value education first nor does he care to provide that influence to his children.
Such a sad situation.
> It’s very clear that op’s father doesn’t value education first nor does he care to provide that influence to his children.
Respectfully, I would disagree with you on this statement. I don't feel that it is implying your point, or certainly not to that extent.
Is reading morally superior? It seems like greater society (with the apps) is rapidly changing back to an oral culture which seems to be humanity’s default setting.
Edit - via the visual boost of short form video
For a long time learning required a primary attention of a person. Usually a monopoly attention. You can't read printed text and do something else in parallel (fidgeting doesn't count). Radio and TV facilitated background viewing and listening but there weren't many options to personalize those. And then IT revolution happened and humanity discovered that they can do something as a primary attention task and "learn" in background by listening to a narrated educational media. And with the invention of speed-up, those people are now debating is x2 speed-up too slow, and just how fast can they go while still discerning words.
it's my personal hot-take, but I think that a majority of those background listeners are doing performative "learning" and aren't learning anything really. It's just to brag once a year that they have "read" 100+ books in a year and post a wall of covers or a number on their social network feed.
Basically, books aren't morally superior media than anything else really. But focused and monopoly attention dedicated to some media is morally superior to a performative background "learning". Books simply eliminate even a possibility of reading them in background.
> Is reading morally superior?
No. Of course not. Someone who can't read due to mental disability isn't morally inferior to someone who can and does.
He obviously meant "is choosing to spend your time reading morally superior", though.
I hate these discussions on HN. Unless we first agree on what 'good' and 'bad' are, this question is basically nonsense. In any case, what you choose to do on your own in your free time has basically no moral or ethical impact whatsoever.
No man is an island, you know.
> He obviously meant "is choosing to spend your time reading morally superior", though
Sure. I'm answering it by another measure. Killing is, ceteris paribus, morally inferior to not killing. I'd argue a psychopath is henceforth morally debilitated despite it not really being their "fault" that they're born without empathy. This, in turn, helps me conclude that a murderer is, in fact, doing wrong.
Same here. Someone who can't read isn't inherently less morally capable than someone who can. What reading gives one is the capacity to gain a better understanding of ethics and morals. So I'd guess folks who read books are, on average, more intelligent and at least seeking to conduct themselves in a more moral fashion than someone who doesn't. But that doesn't make spending time reading morally superior to some other activity.
That reading gives the capacity to gain a better understanding, doesn't mean that all readers use it that way. The act of reading itself doesn't make the people more willing to be more understanding. Someone who cannot read could have the same desire for understanding and might choose to engage that desire by talking to people in person. The fact that the latter doesn't read, doesn't make him less morally superior.
The only correlation that reading and intelligence have is that intelligent people find it easier to read, and therefore enjoy reading more, and therefore read more. It's not the other way around.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868
>Is reading morally superior?
Yes. Because its less information that "Oral" which is just video content.
Text is raw information. Viewing a person speaking is Information + social and context clues. Clues that humans find it very hard to resist. We are social mammals built to fathom our place in the hierarchy by listening to the noises and expressions of other mammals. People will tell you that they love science or philosophy or something, but often what they actually love is the person telling them about it. With monetised content being the norm these days, people are exploiting these side channels while handing out sub par information. And it works. You only need to look at the flat earth movement, almost entirely built on video content, to see the truth in this. People aren't signing up to be flat earthers because the information is valid, they are signing up because they like the people giving them the faulty information.
No we would absolutely be better off going back to reading. Its much healthier.
I found Amazon's Whispersync (audiobook + ebook synced) helpful for keeping me engaged in books in the smartphone era. This is a plug, but I made my own epub + text to speech reader for iOS for keeping myself engaged in reading, and have been reading/listening to classics such as Crime and Punishment this way: https://heard.quest/
A few months ago I spent an entire Saturday reading a long book (Underworld by Don DeLillo) deliberately with my phone off. I walked around, went to a restaurant, sat on a bench in the park, all with just the book. It was one of the most “grounded” days I’ve had in years, and I felt like I noticed dozens of things about the place I live that I hadn’t noticed before.
Ironically it was the exact day that the recent Iran war started. But I didn’t find out about it until late at night, when I turned my phone back on.
I dropped Twitter for Lent this year, just in time for the fighting to pick up. Being stuck with slow, oversimplified (and likely propagandistic) news coverage instead of the usual OSINT accounts, (likely fake) firsthand reports, and bad-but-fun hot takes was frustrating for a bit .
(I still haven't gotten back on, and I'm much happier for it)
I deeply resonate with this. Even when I began reading, I felt myself wanting to jump away into my email or some other needless task. After getting through the premise, it felt almost like a challenge to read the entire blog. Very well done.
"Reading a long, serious book—seemed like checking out, Scrolling was alright" - couldn't agree more on this paragraph.
at work we started making a libary with books we want to read to keep us sane and adopting good and old practices in the world of ai. its very easy to get blind nowdays but reading have helped me alot
Most people never really developed the habit of reading.
They sure did consume the newspaper but that has now been replaced with social media. The medium changed but the habits did not.
I think author is having an existential crisis instead of the world as he wrote.
The addiction of these mediums is undeniable. But let’s not lie to ourselves; only a few people liked to read. Anything that requires deep concentration often needs incentives or real consequences to make it more compelling.
The only way out of this is elimination of the medium itself.
You wouldn’t want a cocaine addict to carry a bag of cocaine in his pocket. But this is what’s happening to us all.