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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I believe I've clearly outlined how I believe the skill and taste of reading is typically developed in my previous comments.

Reviewing your earlier comments, I see a examples of how you think learning doesn't work, e.g.

I don't really think that reading is valuable in itself unless you are reading something worth reading.

I do not believe that you can learn to expand what you like by reading more of what you already like.

I also don't think that the tactic of reading garbage is likely to lead to appreciation of actually good literature

...but I don't see a positive model of how you think reading comprehension is built and how people learn to love reading.

There's twenty thousand years of human literature out there. Believe it or not, the ancestors even had literature that wasn't highbrow... The point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty of good books that aren't difficult (surely that should be clear from the examples I gave). It's not clear to me that reading slop helps read good books any more than watching tiktoks helps you enjoy movies.

People can just go directly to reading good books unless they are a literal child who needs to start with "Jack and Jill went up the hill," although to be honest Hemingway is not much harder than that. They have my permission to skip the slop and just read something worth reading.

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