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Your Brain Was Never Supposed to Read

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Alan Jacobs • The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

Carr makes a distinction between "deep" and "shallow" reading. While deep reading involves immersive engagement, shallow reading is used in tasks like skimming an index or reading street signs. Evidence suggests that internet use promotes skimming text over deep reading, even when we interact with printed text offline. While bro

Shortform • The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

LLMs are reading companions. When Patel is reading a book, he uses LLMs to understand concepts that he isn’t familiar with, like the nuances of White’s argument about how the stirrup created feudalism. “There's a bunch of stuff that's confusing...on these kinds of questions. The author is dead...but I can always continue the conversation with Clau

A Guide to Lifelong Learning—With AI

Several teams of scientists have spent years figuring out: Can you make humans read things really, really fast? They found that you can—but it always comes at a cost.

Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

It’s a hefty 206-page research paper, and the findings are concerning. "LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" This study finds LLM dependence weakens the writer’s own neural and linguistic fingerprints. 🤔🤔 Relying only on EEG, text mining, and a cross-over session, the authors show that keeping som... See more

Rohan Paul

x.com

Socrates himself was famously on the other side of your position, an Oral Supremacist versus your Text Supremacist. Socrates argued that text is markedly inferior to oral information conveyance, precisely because text can't interact, it can't talk back.

Marc Andreessen • The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen - Interviewed by a Retard

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we

Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention And How to Think Deeply Again

This Maria Popova quote stopped me in my tracks:

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but n... See more