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Comment by newnewpdro | Hacker News Reader

How does one passively consume textual content?

Reading engages the brain in an entirely different way than viewing images does. When you read you interpret meaning from text and construct a mental model of what's being described.

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I've long struggled with retaining what I read. It feels like I've trained my brain to enjoy the quick dopamine hits from, for example, reading short stories or, say, seeing a problem someone has that my brain can pretend to solve. Sites like Reddit or StackExchange.

Yes, maybe I interpret text in my head and build mental models, but my brain just throws them away as soon as the story is over. Ask me what I read about 5 minutes later and I swear, I won't be able to tell.

Ingesting data and evaluating it according to some model, sounds like what a good cluster node would do. No need to permanently store neither the data nor the output on the node itself, but you might want it to update its process via learning.

Scrolling through reddit or HN threads takes almost no mental effort. I’d dare say it’s the sort of thing people do to relax after reading “hard” content like novels or research. Speaking personally, I can feel burnt out from reading a novel for a while. On the other hand, I can mindlessly scroll through internet comments, read them in full, and not notice that hours have passed and feel zero exhaustion from it.

I don’t feel exhausted, rather: bored by fiction and non-fiction alike.

Having said that, it often feels like the internet speaks with one voice, even when it’s disagreeing with itself.

Rarely does anyone say or write anything original.

I guess HN feels more familiar though, more like family. And we’re probably driven by millions of years of evolution to seek that out.

Yes the Internet's voice is very homogenous. I crave the tiny YouTube videos that are posted by people that have truly different views and are articulated well.

There's too much everyday garbage on the web, it's disappointing quantity is trumping form and quality. If YouTube loosened up it's monetization rules and went back to letting the producer set the form we could have more focused videos. The ten minute spam videos are the plague.

HN is more rational and quantitative than other sites in general so I prefer this as a counter to other more abstract information sources.

I believe you can read a novel more or less mindlessly, as you can read HN. But HN is more surprising, and it's like a slot-machine (in the analogy that Tristan Harris makes with social media).

For me it is like System 1 or System 2 taking charge (as in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow", by Kahneman).

You can’t passively consume anything. You say you have to interpret meaning from words. Sure, but.. What about faces? Tone of voice? Body language?

You’re correct. It seems though that there’s something about the level of - I can’t think of a less ridiculous phrase than - adaptive engagement you marshall while performing tasks that’s important.

a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting.

So I’m assuming the importance of television isn’t that it’s television, but that it’s minimally stimulating activity, so easily within your cognitive capacity as to require neither physical nor mental discipline nor adaptation, requiring just enough from you to displace sleep.

I don’t watch a lot of tv, but I choose to take this as a warning I need to do less scrolling

Edit: one thing in particular that stands out is the discussion of television being fast paced, fleeting information, I wonder if I’m viewing adaptation incorrectly here, what if it’s that we are exhausting our adaptive capacity, training ourselves on static?

> a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting.

Viewers do this as well. Analysis of literature and of television/film overlap to some degree, and both require an active consumer of the material.

I think the question is: Given an equal amount of effort on the part of the consumer, does one medium convey more benefits than the other?

My completely unfounded theory is that reading and watching both exercise different portions of the brain, like running and swimming. But like running and swimming, there is a wide spectrum of available exercise intensity - and even in their most intense forms they don’t exercise the whole of the brain.

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