alt Hacker NewsI Learned to Read Again
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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.
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?
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.
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
It does feel like reading books is one of the best activities for reconditioning your brain in the wake of screen/dopamine addiction
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
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
s/^/How /[dead]
> 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.