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Comment by Treegarden | Hacker News Reader

I think this is good.

Reading and really understanding a text is not cognitively easy. It should be a privilege for a text to be read by me.

I am a productive and I work a lot with my head. I in my free time I listen to a lot of Audiobooks (fiction and factual) and I view that as the best vessel for taking in information in a causal way. If I really need to study something then I read it. But how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it - especially in the age of click-bait and low quality journalism. If it is an extremely good text then I will recognize it as such by myself and study it.

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I agree there's a lot of crap out there, but the point of the article is that even for text that is worth the effort, your ability to supply said effort will have been diminished by a lifetime habit of skim-reading. The ability to read deeply has to be exercised constantly. It cannot be turned on and off. The other thing is, will you still be able to recognize every text that is worth your time? These seem like worthy points to me.

It's a good point. Trying to reread some classic texts that I missed in a STEM curriculum, I've definitely noticed my attention is not what it used to be.

But, like anything: exercise creates ability. And so I try to keep plowing my way through.

I chronically skim read articles and emails, because people are generally very bad at writing those things. They will usually contain a lot more information that I don’t care about than information that I do care about.

But I also read about 1 book a week, and I don’t struggle to devote my full attention to them. I don’t think switching between skimming and comprehensive reading is the problem, I think it’s that if you never do comprehensive reading that you’ll struggle to get back into it.

Yeah, and that's the other problem this article is pointing at--young children aren't developing deep reading skills like you have, because the girls are getting waylaid by social media and the boys by video games. They won't have the option of skimming the bad shit and deep reading the good stuff.

Well said. News articles/editorials/blogs are especially bloated these days. It often not worth spending the mental effort when not a lot of mental effort was put into the writing.

Did you read the article? Your response has nothing to do with any of the points raised in the article.

Besides, how presumptuous is it to proclaim "how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it"?

Maybe he skimmed it.

> Besides, how presumptuous is it to proclaim "how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it"?

Not at all. I'm 30. I'm going to live to be 80 at best. I've only fifty years left. Fifty years of fifty weeks each. 2500 weeks of 7 days each. If I spend two hours reading every day, that's 35000 hours left. That's 70000 half-hour works.

Is this work in the top 70k that Man has ever written? That's the standard. I only have one life. And to me it is everything. What I read needs to be at the 99.999th percentile. Life's too short for anything else.

And yet you are chitchatting on HN instead of reading one of those top works.

Because those need attention. If I'm waiting for my Lyft to take me to my book club meeting, like I am right now, I only have three minutes. I can't use that to make any progress on Conjectures and Refutations.

So these things have poor cost structure for what they provide. I like The Economist on my morning fifteen min BART for instance. And that's because that's dense.

But if I have half an hour, that's enough for me to read something worthwhile instead of this stuff.

Again, that's not the point. That tirade has nothing to do with the article, it's just something you wanted to say.

And yet I think that is much more interesting and valuable then the article.

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