It doesn't make you smarter or dumber if you consume your media as book form or audio form. There are some limitations to the medium, and some advantages.
Some books and authors are great, and are able to make great pieces of art. Others, not so much...
You don’t think there’s any effect on the person from the medium itself? No truth at all to “the medium is the message”
I have many young family members and I think that the way screens affect them is pretty strong evidence, for me, that the medium of story/information matters a lot.
Kids react to iPads and television they same way they react to cake. It gets them freaking high.
We know refined sugar is bad for adults even if they aren’t as obvious in carnal delight when they consume it as kids. I think the same is likely true for screens.
If for no other reason, to exercise your ability to pay attention. At a time when people are degrading their attention spans to those of goldfish on crack, maintaining or improving one's attention span is worth it's weight in gold
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
Minotaur 1yr ago
A manifesto is about some perceived ill in the world and a proposed answer or solution. 200+ page deep explorations are useful for far more than manifestos.
But the most important things about books versus other formats is that they end, and they aren’t changed after publication. That means that, unlike this very reply, they are certain to be the same as when you first read them, and unless you get a later edition or a sequel, they contain exactly the amount the author and publisher agreed to publish.
I do think that perhaps there's so much emphasis on reading as being something laudable, when I'm not quite certain all, or even much of it is. Most of my friends read a lot of books, but it's not like they're reading scientific studies, thought-provoking essays, anything that might teach new skills, or even great classic literature. They're reading fantasy and sci-fi novels, and sometimes romance novels. I fail to see why reading such novels should be considered to be such a good use of one's time, and I feel like you can get just as much in terms of thought provoking content out of certain TV programs. Books can be just as much of "junk food for the brain" as TV can be.
There is flimsy, fun content and weightier, more-rewarding content in every medium. The golden age of opera and the dark age of opera are two terms for the same period (mid-to-late 1800s) when opera experienced a massive commercial boom in Italy and to some extent Germany. A whole mass of operas were created, most of them have rightly been forgotten as they were uninspired, formulaic cash-grabs. But some, still considered classics, emerged from that mass that was produced. Plenty of Verdi being performed, today.
A lot of the same criticisms about kids rotting their brains have been rolled out with the proliferation of each new medium — the serial novel in the wake of the movable-type printing press, films, radio programs, television programs, video games, social media…
But mediums shape content and technology shapes content. The particular advantage of books is that they’re an information-dense medium everyone can consume at their own pace. People naturally slow down, stop, dwell, ponder, resume, speed up, slow back down, etc. while reading. This can be approximated in other mediums, but doing so is comparatively clumsy. Video games get closest, given how interactive they are. But, they don’t tend to lend themselves to exploring the same content, given how costly they are to produce. As an example, faithful non-fiction like a realistic WWI game depicting the misery and tedium of life in the trenches, as opposed to just using period weapons, clothing, terrain and equipment, is going to face a taller commercial hurdle (and require books and other written materials to research). And a documentary or audiobook cannot cover as much material in the same amount of time.
Whether that advantage appeals to someone is their prerogative. In practice, I’ve not encountered the same depth in other mediums and this is surely downstream from how different mediums shape content.
And, I’m not banging the “make you a better person” drum, here. I find the Thirty Years War and WWI interesting, and enjoyed reading about them. But learning more about them gave me no advantage in my professional career, etc.
Looping back to O.P., I think formal schooling sours some people on reading because you’re getting assignments issued to you. If you had to play video games and watch movies you regularly found tedious, similar feelings might emerge.
How did you manage to go through school without even being made to read a book once? What did you learn basic literacy with?
To actually answer the question: something others haven't mentioned is that text is the lowest-cost medium of expression. If you have a good idea, but don't have the time/skills/capital/popularity/marketability to express it in a documentary or a graphical novel or a catchy Youtube video, you will write it down. Thus, reading allows you to reach not only those good ideas who were had by good clip makers, but the rest of good ideas as well.
To illustrate: good books are often written alone, perhaps with an editor or two poring them over as far as I'm aware. In contrast, a good movie today is a crowd of actors, technicians, directors, screenwriters and at least a small boatload of money to pay them all.
As ZorbaTHut mentioned, reading is how you find good shit like Unsong or Pale that's probably not going to hit the screens in the author's lifetime.
A book is not the only form of reading. I could assume that your question pertains to reading books specifically and not the act of reading in general. But even that is grey line. What about short stories? Does the 50k novella The Great Gatsby count as reading a book? If I watch a foreign language film with subtitles on is that reading? If Scott write a 50k word blog post is that reading? Is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: fan fiction, a long blog post, or a philosophical work? Does reading fan fiction count? Is reading a trashy romance with lots of sex scenes still reading? Comics have words, so reading? News articles? How about the instruction manual for my new phone? What are you defining as reading?
Everyone frequents some variant of flimsy entertainment - cable news, cartoons, social media - so why bother trying to read anything worthwhile anyways if nobody else is? Does reading actually make you more curious, more intelligent, more human?
No media is flimsy on it's own. Even the worst work can be great and insightful in the right context. A particular media only becomes seen as flimsy when it becomes predictable and repetitive or is not considered. A great wine drunk without thought is no longer a great wine. A shitty wine drunk with care, attention, and enthusiasm becomes a great wine, no longer flimsy but fabulous.
I've been watching the Monster High movies lately and by regular standards they are terrible movies made to sell merchandise. But they're not all bad and the bits that stick out as well done I take note of and I think about why they work and how do I replicate the same effects in my storytelling. Likewise I see the terrible bits and I learn what not to do. I spend time thinking about how it could have been done better. I watch and read other things too, some much more respected, but I find value in all of it.
Curiosity correlates with intelligence and both of those things do perhaps form a component of what defines being human. Those who are more curious will consume a larger variety of things in general. If Intelligent people read more I think it is partly because they do more things in general. But also I think varity feeds the mind. Knowing other languages changes the way we see the world.
Doing new things promotes new growth, not necessarily always for the better, but always growth. We can direct the growth, so if most people want to be better, whatever that means to them, then exposing themselves to variety will make them so. That includes what others see as flimsy entertainment up until the point that it becomes too well known to ourselves. Of course give it long enough and things can be forgotten or the context changes making the familiar unfamiliar and interesting again.
This seems a little bit of a joke post as I’m sure you read. It improves cognitive performance.
I’ve personally switched to more online phone reading than books and I’ve found other people like me have done the same. This Im not sure is a good thing versus reading more long form.
The thing is a lot of good information exists on twitter and blogs now. If you know how to use them.
This Im not sure is a good thing versus reading more long form.
The good news is that you can find some veryveryvery long-form stuff out there if you want.
(be warned, that last link is the longest single work of fiction in the English language, and it's not yet done; also the first few hundred thousand words are pretty rough)
Some of this stuff just can't be found in paper form, but I honestly don't have a problem with that, and I don't get why people are so obsessed with paper. Words are words; the medium is not the measure of quality, it's just a measure of convenience.
It is a measure that someone cared enough to invest paper in it. In my experience if something is printed, there's still the occasional godawful thing but it raises the 5th percentile substantially.
(also while I love the freedom that comes with writing a web novel, most of them would still benefit from an editor)
There is, of course, a lot of dreck on the web because it's so low-cost. But there's also the occasional gem that is not tainted by worldly concerns such as "having to appease a publisher".
There are cognitive benefits. Your language speaking fluency is directly related to your reading. The more yoU read; the better your verbal skills, which can reap huge social benefits
TheMotte is filled with users who get personal enjoyment from learning information for its own sake, even when it has no tangible benefit to their lives. So you’re going to get pushback due to this natural bias.
I essentially agree with you that reading is overrated. But “reading” is a large category. The question I think is, what is the best way to experience great things? Books have competition: real life experience, music, listening to speakers, art. The words we read in a sense can only refer back to our previous experiences, and so a life filled with reading and little experience is lesser than the opposite.
But in order to experience great things we must know what the great things are. So there are some reads that are worthwhile, philosophy and theology, psychology, and some great literature, which provides us a map for great experiences. Philosophy tells us what provides lasting good, and homes our reason. Theology helps to organize the mind around this good and to feel it on a deeper level, and good literature fleshes out these truths in a story. Books are necessary for these topics because we have to take our time going back and forth over the sentences to understand the truth deeply.
Every other type of book? I’m not persuaded on their inherent value. Reading stories that aren’t brilliant has no benefit. History has no benefit unless it is motivating great actions. Learning facts has no benefit unless they are necessary for great things.
People vastly overestimate the amount of information on the internet. Nowadays I get most of my reading from the internet, but when I open a real book, written to be inform attentive readers, the amount of detail there is usually literally amazing. Quite apart from the density mentioned by the others, the quality of the information is just so much higher than you can get anywhere else.
I don't know if you've traveled much, but people who have traveled generally agree that traveling is good for you in many ways. The problem is that if someone tries to explain to someone who hasn't traveled how much traveling can change, enrich, and expand your perspective on the world, they just end up sounding like a pompous boob. Reading is the same. At the risk of sounding like a pompous boob, I object to the idea that "all these people are doing just fine." It seems to me that huge numbers of people suffer from narrow global outlooks, shortened historical outlooks, confused scientific outlooks, facile religious outlooks, and self-serving philosophical outlooks. This all combines in a soup of error and small-souledness, and while I don't claim to be feasting on a stew of truth and magnanimity, I notice many differences between my life and the lives of people who don't read, just as a gym-rat notices many differences between himself and people who don't lift. Mottistes will doubtless insist that reading correlates with IQ, and IQ with a lack of error and small-souledness, but my IQ was what it was long before I devoted my life to extreme reading. That time of my life is over now- I have kids, and a job, etc, so I read a lot less and I notice that I used to just be . . . better. If you are the average of the people you hang out with, it pays to hang out with the best thinkers we know of, through the Magic Of Books!
Note: I'm talking here about philosophy and history and economics and science and uppercase-L Literature. Not Game of Thrones or Jack Reacher. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but as a pompous boob, I've just never tried it.
I like to think of things like game of thrones and jack reacher as gateway drugs to the good stuff you mentioned in your note. After all, at least half of, if not more capital L Literature started off as pulp trash for plebs. For someone who has never read a book, I expect jumping straight into Aurelius or Camus would be kind of daunting, or maybe straight up off putting.
The written word is vastly more information dense than any other medium. Say you want to know something more about a subject: maybe it's wormholes, maybe it's the Taiping Rebellion, maybe it's about music theory. Well if you want to get even the slightest bit of insight it requires reading a text. A youtube video cannot approach virtually any subject with the required depth. Listening to someone read a text is just inefficient; the audiobook version of the book I read over Thanksgiving weekend runs 53 hours. And some subjects require a combination of plain and pictorial text/illustrations to get across key concepts.
If you want to learn anything about any academic subject, there is no substitute for reading.
Wiki is an encyclopedia; it's a primer on a topic, and a good resource for finding more in-depth resources, but not a substitute for actual academic work. A good academic history, for example, will go far beyond what is able to be captured in a wikipedia article. For example, the wikipedia article on the Thirty Years' War has a bit shy of 16,000 words (and much of that is devoted to the bibliography/footnotes). A recent prominent history on the subject that I read has ~256,000.
Can you clarify what you mean by read? Presumably you can read this comment. Reading fiction or nonfictions books in particular is probably not something every or even most people need to do regularly, other things like news columns, blog posts or other forms of content can substitute for the most part. I will say you're probably missing out on some perspectives that don't fit into such small windows.
Troll. Sheesh. The only other post he made is an adequacyDOTorg style post about having schools teach mostly sports, with some English and math, and no history or science. And too many questions, and on a subject that themotte would be perceived to oppose.
(And how do I prevent adequacy dot org from being automatically converted into a link?)
You came to a website full of belligerent nerds who read and write thousands of words every day about everything and asked if reading is worth it. The trolling suspicion is nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with that. Would you be perplexed if you were called a troll after asking a football forum about the economic value of kicking a ball?
Please don't tell the troll why he's a troll. He already knows. Telling him only makes sense from a mistake theory point of view. Trolls are not mistake theory.
For every troll there's also someone who would do the same thing but be completely genuine. I don't think it's obvious that this is a troll, in fact I'd lean hevily towards it not being at the moment.
First, I disagree with some of your factual claims. When I go to my local library there are plenty of people there, and bookstores are still doing quite well.
But to answer your question: you read because it's fun. There's no great mystery to it. I enjoy reading books that expose me to interesting new ideas, or tell an engaging story. And books do both of those things in ways that other media just can't compete with. For example, a book can pull off the "character2 was actually character1 in disguise" twist without you ever seeing it coming, which is flat out impossible in a visual medium.
My question to you is: why on earth would you not bother reading? Given that lots of people still read, they must be getting something out of it. Haven't you wondered, even once, if you would also get something valuable from the experience of reading a book?
Yeah I don't really like reading either, that other stuff is definitely more entertaining, but it's ultimately useless and a waste of my time. If I want to be of any use thinking about or talking about a topic I need the depth that comes from reading. It forces you to think about it. Audiobooks don't usually work as well, because I can hear what they're saying without thinking about it, plus with reading I can spend the time I want on a thought or a piece of the text where audiobooks/videos just move on.
So, at the end of the day this stuff is all subjective. But I think you're making a mistake by thinking in terms of things like "How can you spend a bunch of time analyzing someone else's thoughts when you can just go outside or look at something dumb on the internet that's probably more entertaining right off the bat?". I actually don't think swiping through dumb shit on the internet is more entertaining, even at first. It's just lower effort. It's easy to find content that is "good enough", and lots of it. Whereas with a book you may take a few tries to find one that interests you, or you might have a book which takes a while to get good.
But make no mistake, I've read books that were incredible right off the bat. Lots of authors can set up an interesting story hook in the opening pages of the book which keeps you curious to know more. It's not like those don't exist. But they aren't every book, for sure.
All that said, all things aren't for all people. Like, some people will say that they love exercising and that it's addictive. Me, I have never found that to be the case and I think it's pure suffering (albeit necessary suffering). Or, some people (most people even) think babies are cute. I personally think babies are ugly as hell, and can't understand what people see in them. So maybe you're wired to not like books the way I'm wired to not like exercise or babies. It's OK. But if that's the case, I think you should at least recognize "it's not for me but others enjoy it", rather than asking questions that make it come off as though you think book readers are suffering when they spend time reading.
Why should I read this book to know why I should read?
I mean, I don't know that you should, but since you asked the question "why read" I sort of assumed you were interested in an answer. If you have asked the question insincerely (which seems to be the case) then it doesn't especially matter how I answer you. But if you actually want an answer to the question you took the time to ask, then that is why you should read this book, or the one @baj2235 linked below--or indeed, you could perhaps read many different books, and decide for yourself that you've been right all along ("that was indeed a waste of time and effort--I shouldn't read, and I no longer need to ask the question!") or learn something new ("ah--so this is why I should read, I see now").
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Notes -
Eh, book is a medium.
It doesn't make you smarter or dumber if you consume your media as book form or audio form. There are some limitations to the medium, and some advantages.
Some books and authors are great, and are able to make great pieces of art. Others, not so much...
You don’t think there’s any effect on the person from the medium itself? No truth at all to “the medium is the message”
I have many young family members and I think that the way screens affect them is pretty strong evidence, for me, that the medium of story/information matters a lot.
Kids react to iPads and television they same way they react to cake. It gets them freaking high.
We know refined sugar is bad for adults even if they aren’t as obvious in carnal delight when they consume it as kids. I think the same is likely true for screens.
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If for no other reason, to exercise your ability to pay attention. At a time when people are degrading their attention spans to those of goldfish on crack, maintaining or improving one's attention span is worth it's weight in gold
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Books are psychoactive and change your perception of reality.
Your perception of reality now most likely isn’t as interesting as it could be.
Have you ever read a blog article that changed your perception of your world?
Many, perhaps even most of the interesting ideas out there do not currently exist in blog or other online shortform formats.
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The format of media influences its form.
Books encourage 200+ pages of material with a common theme. That is the ideal format for deep exploration of an idea.
Blogs, articles, etc are optimized for their ability to draw in drive-by readers. At best they don't reward depth, at worst they punish it.
We call these manifestos, and blogs are fine for them. I'm sure you can even find plenty -- though you probably don't want to read them.
A manifesto is about some perceived ill in the world and a proposed answer or solution. 200+ page deep explorations are useful for far more than manifestos.
But the most important things about books versus other formats is that they end, and they aren’t changed after publication. That means that, unlike this very reply, they are certain to be the same as when you first read them, and unless you get a later edition or a sequel, they contain exactly the amount the author and publisher agreed to publish.
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I do think that perhaps there's so much emphasis on reading as being something laudable, when I'm not quite certain all, or even much of it is. Most of my friends read a lot of books, but it's not like they're reading scientific studies, thought-provoking essays, anything that might teach new skills, or even great classic literature. They're reading fantasy and sci-fi novels, and sometimes romance novels. I fail to see why reading such novels should be considered to be such a good use of one's time, and I feel like you can get just as much in terms of thought provoking content out of certain TV programs. Books can be just as much of "junk food for the brain" as TV can be.
There is flimsy, fun content and weightier, more-rewarding content in every medium. The golden age of opera and the dark age of opera are two terms for the same period (mid-to-late 1800s) when opera experienced a massive commercial boom in Italy and to some extent Germany. A whole mass of operas were created, most of them have rightly been forgotten as they were uninspired, formulaic cash-grabs. But some, still considered classics, emerged from that mass that was produced. Plenty of Verdi being performed, today.
A lot of the same criticisms about kids rotting their brains have been rolled out with the proliferation of each new medium — the serial novel in the wake of the movable-type printing press, films, radio programs, television programs, video games, social media…
But mediums shape content and technology shapes content. The particular advantage of books is that they’re an information-dense medium everyone can consume at their own pace. People naturally slow down, stop, dwell, ponder, resume, speed up, slow back down, etc. while reading. This can be approximated in other mediums, but doing so is comparatively clumsy. Video games get closest, given how interactive they are. But, they don’t tend to lend themselves to exploring the same content, given how costly they are to produce. As an example, faithful non-fiction like a realistic WWI game depicting the misery and tedium of life in the trenches, as opposed to just using period weapons, clothing, terrain and equipment, is going to face a taller commercial hurdle (and require books and other written materials to research). And a documentary or audiobook cannot cover as much material in the same amount of time.
Whether that advantage appeals to someone is their prerogative. In practice, I’ve not encountered the same depth in other mediums and this is surely downstream from how different mediums shape content.
And, I’m not banging the “make you a better person” drum, here. I find the Thirty Years War and WWI interesting, and enjoyed reading about them. But learning more about them gave me no advantage in my professional career, etc.
Looping back to O.P., I think formal schooling sours some people on reading because you’re getting assignments issued to you. If you had to play video games and watch movies you regularly found tedious, similar feelings might emerge.
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Sometimes useful info is in books
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Because you are really dumb and one of the ways to fake being smart is to bootstrap using the knowledge of actual smart people.
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How did you manage to go through school without even being made to read a book once? What did you learn basic literacy with?
To actually answer the question: something others haven't mentioned is that text is the lowest-cost medium of expression. If you have a good idea, but don't have the time/skills/capital/popularity/marketability to express it in a documentary or a graphical novel or a catchy Youtube video, you will write it down. Thus, reading allows you to reach not only those good ideas who were had by good clip makers, but the rest of good ideas as well.
To illustrate: good books are often written alone, perhaps with an editor or two poring them over as far as I'm aware. In contrast, a good movie today is a crowd of actors, technicians, directors, screenwriters and at least a small boatload of money to pay them all.
As ZorbaTHut mentioned, reading is how you find good shit like Unsong or Pale that's probably not going to hit the screens in the author's lifetime.
Knowing reoccuring ideas and patterns and when to apply them is a part of intelligence in my books.
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A book is not the only form of reading. I could assume that your question pertains to reading books specifically and not the act of reading in general. But even that is grey line. What about short stories? Does the 50k novella The Great Gatsby count as reading a book? If I watch a foreign language film with subtitles on is that reading? If Scott write a 50k word blog post is that reading? Is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: fan fiction, a long blog post, or a philosophical work? Does reading fan fiction count? Is reading a trashy romance with lots of sex scenes still reading? Comics have words, so reading? News articles? How about the instruction manual for my new phone? What are you defining as reading?
No media is flimsy on it's own. Even the worst work can be great and insightful in the right context. A particular media only becomes seen as flimsy when it becomes predictable and repetitive or is not considered. A great wine drunk without thought is no longer a great wine. A shitty wine drunk with care, attention, and enthusiasm becomes a great wine, no longer flimsy but fabulous.
I've been watching the Monster High movies lately and by regular standards they are terrible movies made to sell merchandise. But they're not all bad and the bits that stick out as well done I take note of and I think about why they work and how do I replicate the same effects in my storytelling. Likewise I see the terrible bits and I learn what not to do. I spend time thinking about how it could have been done better. I watch and read other things too, some much more respected, but I find value in all of it.
Curiosity correlates with intelligence and both of those things do perhaps form a component of what defines being human. Those who are more curious will consume a larger variety of things in general. If Intelligent people read more I think it is partly because they do more things in general. But also I think varity feeds the mind. Knowing other languages changes the way we see the world.
Doing new things promotes new growth, not necessarily always for the better, but always growth. We can direct the growth, so if most people want to be better, whatever that means to them, then exposing themselves to variety will make them so. That includes what others see as flimsy entertainment up until the point that it becomes too well known to ourselves. Of course give it long enough and things can be forgotten or the context changes making the familiar unfamiliar and interesting again.
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This seems a little bit of a joke post as I’m sure you read. It improves cognitive performance.
I’ve personally switched to more online phone reading than books and I’ve found other people like me have done the same. This Im not sure is a good thing versus reading more long form.
The thing is a lot of good information exists on twitter and blogs now. If you know how to use them.
The good news is that you can find some very very very long-form stuff out there if you want.
(be warned, that last link is the longest single work of fiction in the English language, and it's not yet done; also the first few hundred thousand words are pretty rough)
Some of this stuff just can't be found in paper form, but I honestly don't have a problem with that, and I don't get why people are so obsessed with paper. Words are words; the medium is not the measure of quality, it's just a measure of convenience.
It is a measure that someone cared enough to invest paper in it. In my experience if something is printed, there's still the occasional godawful thing but it raises the 5th percentile substantially.
(also while I love the freedom that comes with writing a web novel, most of them would still benefit from an editor)
There is, of course, a lot of dreck on the web because it's so low-cost. But there's also the occasional gem that is not tainted by worldly concerns such as "having to appease a publisher".
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There are cognitive benefits. Your language speaking fluency is directly related to your reading. The more yoU read; the better your verbal skills, which can reap huge social benefits
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TheMotte is filled with users who get personal enjoyment from learning information for its own sake, even when it has no tangible benefit to their lives. So you’re going to get pushback due to this natural bias.
I essentially agree with you that reading is overrated. But “reading” is a large category. The question I think is, what is the best way to experience great things? Books have competition: real life experience, music, listening to speakers, art. The words we read in a sense can only refer back to our previous experiences, and so a life filled with reading and little experience is lesser than the opposite.
But in order to experience great things we must know what the great things are. So there are some reads that are worthwhile, philosophy and theology, psychology, and some great literature, which provides us a map for great experiences. Philosophy tells us what provides lasting good, and homes our reason. Theology helps to organize the mind around this good and to feel it on a deeper level, and good literature fleshes out these truths in a story. Books are necessary for these topics because we have to take our time going back and forth over the sentences to understand the truth deeply.
Every other type of book? I’m not persuaded on their inherent value. Reading stories that aren’t brilliant has no benefit. History has no benefit unless it is motivating great actions. Learning facts has no benefit unless they are necessary for great things.
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Two things:
People vastly overestimate the amount of information on the internet. Nowadays I get most of my reading from the internet, but when I open a real book, written to be inform attentive readers, the amount of detail there is usually literally amazing. Quite apart from the density mentioned by the others, the quality of the information is just so much higher than you can get anywhere else.
I don't know if you've traveled much, but people who have traveled generally agree that traveling is good for you in many ways. The problem is that if someone tries to explain to someone who hasn't traveled how much traveling can change, enrich, and expand your perspective on the world, they just end up sounding like a pompous boob. Reading is the same. At the risk of sounding like a pompous boob, I object to the idea that "all these people are doing just fine." It seems to me that huge numbers of people suffer from narrow global outlooks, shortened historical outlooks, confused scientific outlooks, facile religious outlooks, and self-serving philosophical outlooks. This all combines in a soup of error and small-souledness, and while I don't claim to be feasting on a stew of truth and magnanimity, I notice many differences between my life and the lives of people who don't read, just as a gym-rat notices many differences between himself and people who don't lift. Mottistes will doubtless insist that reading correlates with IQ, and IQ with a lack of error and small-souledness, but my IQ was what it was long before I devoted my life to extreme reading. That time of my life is over now- I have kids, and a job, etc, so I read a lot less and I notice that I used to just be . . . better. If you are the average of the people you hang out with, it pays to hang out with the best thinkers we know of, through the Magic Of Books!
Note: I'm talking here about philosophy and history and economics and science and uppercase-L Literature. Not Game of Thrones or Jack Reacher. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but as a pompous boob, I've just never tried it.
I like to think of things like game of thrones and jack reacher as gateway drugs to the good stuff you mentioned in your note. After all, at least half of, if not more capital L Literature started off as pulp trash for plebs. For someone who has never read a book, I expect jumping straight into Aurelius or Camus would be kind of daunting, or maybe straight up off putting.
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The written word is vastly more information dense than any other medium. Say you want to know something more about a subject: maybe it's wormholes, maybe it's the Taiping Rebellion, maybe it's about music theory. Well if you want to get even the slightest bit of insight it requires reading a text. A youtube video cannot approach virtually any subject with the required depth. Listening to someone read a text is just inefficient; the audiobook version of the book I read over Thanksgiving weekend runs 53 hours. And some subjects require a combination of plain and pictorial text/illustrations to get across key concepts.
If you want to learn anything about any academic subject, there is no substitute for reading.
Does include wiki? Wikipedia articles about major events are not uncommonly as long as short books.
Wiki is an encyclopedia; it's a primer on a topic, and a good resource for finding more in-depth resources, but not a substitute for actual academic work. A good academic history, for example, will go far beyond what is able to be captured in a wikipedia article. For example, the wikipedia article on the Thirty Years' War has a bit shy of 16,000 words (and much of that is devoted to the bibliography/footnotes). A recent prominent history on the subject that I read has ~256,000.
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Can you clarify what you mean by read? Presumably you can read this comment. Reading fiction or nonfictions books in particular is probably not something every or even most people need to do regularly, other things like news columns, blog posts or other forms of content can substitute for the most part. I will say you're probably missing out on some perspectives that don't fit into such small windows.
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Troll. Sheesh. The only other post he made is an adequacyDOTorg style post about having schools teach mostly sports, with some English and math, and no history or science. And too many questions, and on a subject that themotte would be perceived to oppose.
(And how do I prevent adequacy dot org from being automatically converted into a link?)
Some troll posts are bad but this at least provides some food for thought.
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You came to a website full of belligerent nerds who read and write thousands of words every day about everything and asked if reading is worth it. The trolling suspicion is nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with that. Would you be perplexed if you were called a troll after asking a football forum about the economic value of kicking a ball?
Please don't tell the troll why he's a troll. He already knows. Telling him only makes sense from a mistake theory point of view. Trolls are not mistake theory.
For every troll there's also someone who would do the same thing but be completely genuine. I don't think it's obvious that this is a troll, in fact I'd lean hevily towards it not being at the moment.
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First, I disagree with some of your factual claims. When I go to my local library there are plenty of people there, and bookstores are still doing quite well.
But to answer your question: you read because it's fun. There's no great mystery to it. I enjoy reading books that expose me to interesting new ideas, or tell an engaging story. And books do both of those things in ways that other media just can't compete with. For example, a book can pull off the "character2 was actually character1 in disguise" twist without you ever seeing it coming, which is flat out impossible in a visual medium.
My question to you is: why on earth would you not bother reading? Given that lots of people still read, they must be getting something out of it. Haven't you wondered, even once, if you would also get something valuable from the experience of reading a book?
Yeah I don't really like reading either, that other stuff is definitely more entertaining, but it's ultimately useless and a waste of my time. If I want to be of any use thinking about or talking about a topic I need the depth that comes from reading. It forces you to think about it. Audiobooks don't usually work as well, because I can hear what they're saying without thinking about it, plus with reading I can spend the time I want on a thought or a piece of the text where audiobooks/videos just move on.
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So, at the end of the day this stuff is all subjective. But I think you're making a mistake by thinking in terms of things like "How can you spend a bunch of time analyzing someone else's thoughts when you can just go outside or look at something dumb on the internet that's probably more entertaining right off the bat?". I actually don't think swiping through dumb shit on the internet is more entertaining, even at first. It's just lower effort. It's easy to find content that is "good enough", and lots of it. Whereas with a book you may take a few tries to find one that interests you, or you might have a book which takes a while to get good.
But make no mistake, I've read books that were incredible right off the bat. Lots of authors can set up an interesting story hook in the opening pages of the book which keeps you curious to know more. It's not like those don't exist. But they aren't every book, for sure.
All that said, all things aren't for all people. Like, some people will say that they love exercising and that it's addictive. Me, I have never found that to be the case and I think it's pure suffering (albeit necessary suffering). Or, some people (most people even) think babies are cute. I personally think babies are ugly as hell, and can't understand what people see in them. So maybe you're wired to not like books the way I'm wired to not like exercise or babies. It's OK. But if that's the case, I think you should at least recognize "it's not for me but others enjoy it", rather than asking questions that make it come off as though you think book readers are suffering when they spend time reading.
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So, uh... I apologize for what is ultimately a somewhat low-effort response, but I can't resist. The answer to your question can be found in this book.
lol bro, he's not going to read that. At least summarize it
Not knowing the answer is his immediate punishment... the long term punishment he won't even know. not having read the book.
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I mean, I don't know that you should, but since you asked the question "why read" I sort of assumed you were interested in an answer. If you have asked the question insincerely (which seems to be the case) then it doesn't especially matter how I answer you. But if you actually want an answer to the question you took the time to ask, then that is why you should read this book, or the one @baj2235 linked below--or indeed, you could perhaps read many different books, and decide for yourself that you've been right all along ("that was indeed a waste of time and effort--I shouldn't read, and I no longer need to ask the question!") or learn something new ("ah--so this is why I should read, I see now").
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See Also
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