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Rick_101 t1_j5tzzol wrote

This is a complex topic, reading extends beyond books. And even then a lot of great people achieved and achieve immeasurable things without reading a whole lot.

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mikarala t1_j5ueagk wrote

I feel like you missed the point of the article. It's not about how a lot of people don't read books, it's about a potentially growing trend of anti-intellectualism that specifically reviles books and denigrates the act of reading them. Take this quote from Sam Bankman-Fried:

> I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

It is not so much that these people are getting their information a different way, it's that they think the time committment to reading or writing a full-length book, rather than being a sign of some virtues such as patience and erudition, is a warning sign of self-indulgence or maybe even ignorance. (After all, if you read books you might get ideas from spending time with other people's perspectives. This would be bad; a betrayal of the self. Better to be totally subsumed in your own thoughts and point-of-view, that way you can truly know yourself and also that other people are a waste of your time.) The impetus, given the framing of these quotes, is obviously narcissism, but it appeals to a frighteningly large sector of the population that has low attention spans and an aversion to actually practicing empathy.

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tedyasso t1_j5umvgz wrote

I think this is also another case where an article title misrepresents what the article is supposed to be about. There are plenty of people who don't read books for understandable reasons (like a learning disability or preference for audio so they can layer that over, say, long drives) but are still intellectually curious in other ways. That's a whole other discussion than people who literally argue against reading books simply because it's long-form media because they only find value in things that have been 'optimized'/shortened to their personal preferences (like the six-paragraph blog post comment, good lord lol).

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Rick_101 t1_j5uiv1j wrote

Well, I get your points, and every sentence could be made into an essay. And they have been discussed vastly, my argument is that there are valid points on both sides, this dialogue has been brought up many times, dialectics will take place and a middle ground will be either enforced or agreed. Intellectualism and pragmatism are valid, necessary and full of friction.

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JoyfullyDepressive t1_j5v94n9 wrote

It’s not a matter of being verbose for the sake of it, it’s that some thing either cannot or should not be condensed. Reading the CliffsNotes is not the same as reading the novel. “A Brief History of Time” cannot be a six paragraph summarization and still make sense.

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scolfin OP t1_j5u15h9 wrote

And, of course, a lot of monsters were voracious readers. Stalin was particularly famous for his library and throughput.

That said, the three people in question weren't exactly proclaiming other avenues of high-quality thought, but we both know how differently people react to anything openly castigating the young women who take pride in consuming social media or YA instead of literary or analytical works.

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