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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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any sort of reading is going to practice the reading comprehension skills that not only directly lead to more educational/professional attainment but also make reading genuinely good books more accessible and therefore more likely to influence them.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

There's a reason kids start with Dick and Jane before Pride and Prejudice

Yes, because they are children. I was hoping that I already addressed this line of reasoning in the previous comment.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Okay, so this is the crux of your disagreement? If I convince you that making a habit of reading anything, including slop, increases a person's ability to read generally-- you'll cede the argument?

I will admit up front that if you are genuinely illiterate, or close to it, you can probably get mileage out of reading any text at all. Beyond that, yes, that is the crux and I will concede if it turns out that people with normal reading abilities benefit in a measurable way from reading slop.

My model of learning is that most skills look kind of like pokemon exp curves-- logistic based on quantity of prior experience, but with difficult tasks paying out more exp. I'll concede that you can come up with definitions of "normal reading abilities" and "slop" such that the addional exp gained by reading slow is effectively negligible, but would argue that in practice...

  1. A person's ability to do something is a combination of not just their skill, but also their motivation and discipline. Even if a book completely fails to increase someone's reading skill, having more positive experiences with books overall increases their motivation to read, and making a habit out of reading increases their discipline.
  2. "Normal reading abilities" aren't. I can point you to any number of surveys that say text comprehension and literacy rates are dropping in the english-speaking world, especially as a result of idiotic teaching policies like elevating "Whole Language Learning" over "phonics". In particular, I addressed my recommendation to read slop very specifically to people I suspect have subnormal reading abilities, in some sense. Ref-- "If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough"... "a parent of one or more boys". I can also point you to literal writing subreddits-- where we should expect people to be far better readers than average-- full of people the kinds of mistakes even trashy pulp novels won't.
  3. Akin to the old quote about family dynamics ("All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,") every bad book tends to be bad in its own unique and fascinating ways. That makes them each individually worthwhile as tutoring resources for what not to do, because even the least discerning reader is likely to pick up on specific things they don't like and end up wanting to avoid. Speaking of my own experience, I have read a truly absurd quantity of terrible fanfiction... and unfortunately, as a result, have managed to develop taste. I really wish I hadn't, but alas. I'd developed an allergic reaction to meandering plots, flat characters, and bland power fantasies that can really only be attributable to how many times I've encountered all of those things, and as result had my quota for "bad, but fun" books nearly saturated. That leaves me with the "good, but fun," and "less fun, but legitimately great" books, the kind I think you'd want me reading. I think other people can replicate that exact same path... if I just get them to start reading, first.

You are basically just restating your premise. Surely you can't expect anyone who disagrees with you to be convinced by this?

Based on your writing, I am going to assume that you are a zoomer. Have you considered the possibility that your literary tastes have developed not because you read a ton of garbage but because you became an adult over the course of the time period in question?

You are basically just restating your premise. Surely you can't expect anyone who disagrees with you to be convinced by this?

I don't expect them to be convinced outright, but I do expect them to at least try to counter them with an alternative mode of how learning might work or arguments that any of these points are inapplicable. If all you have to say is "nuh uh" then I don't have a chance at figuring out what differences there are between our underlying beliefs that cause us to draw different conclusions.

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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