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User1  3yr ago (text post)   3648 thread views

Why Read?

I have never read a book in my life. I might as well be illiterate, and most people around me might as well be too. Most libraries are vacant, and bookstores are gone. But all these people are doing fine - we put anything down on paper, and despite its incoherence it seems fine by standards that have stooped for reasons I do not know. I can turn in something that makes absolutely no sense, and an instructor from a decent school will tell me that he enjoyed it. Or an instructor won’t enjoy it, but since most people don’t write anything comprehensible anymore I’ll still be fine. I can cruise through my education and get a job while barely having read much at all. 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?

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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.

  • Well if you want to get even the slightest bit of insight it requires reading a text.

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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