This was great. I think what the literary and scholarly-debate traditions share — but which the television, 'morning radio', and short-form-video traditions do not — is the extension and refinement of the train of attention out into sufficient breadth to form a world-model.
Interestingly, I can quantify this a little bit: I came of age in the professional Magic: The Gathering community where there was an astounding amount of print content people regularly consumed to get a sense of metagames and matchups. Now it's virtually all video. And consequently, the density function of people at tournaments with robust model-level understandings of the dynamics of what's going on is way, way down — even as the level of overall talent remains as high or higher. Exposure, and the ability to solitaire, is more refined than ever. But 'theoretical understanding' is vastly lower, and is exploitable.
Not sure if this is still going on, but when I was in med school there was a big focus on making doctors more empathetic and kind and just better people by exposing us to humanities. Meanwhile right after med school most residents work 80+ hours a week and we are surprised when these sleep deprived residents working an intense 80 hour week and dealing with lean staffing standards (i.e. covering a lot of patients at once, meaning it’s going to take awhile for many patients to be seen) are cranky and seem overly efficiency focused! I don’t think reading is going to be the answer to that…
"< latest tech outrage > is why we need to force all these STEM bros to read books! they would be empathetic if only they'd take one (1) humanities class!!!!"
This essay feels like it's confusing a lot of things. I don't think anyone is arguing that the down turn in reading is monocausal. But more that the change is indicative and descriptive of other things occurring.
When we turn from essays and books to TV and short form video not only does the medium change, but the types of stuff made tends to change.
It's not that populism and extremism can't exist without video, but that video encourages populist thought.
I stopped watching TV news probably 15+ years ago for precisely this reason, it's all 30 second sound bytes, no deep analysis and discussion.
And short form video and social media has just ramped this problem up even further. No deep discussions just a quick meme
Side note, I remember reading the Tarzan series in Middle School. I decided to revisit it last year and it struck me how much more complicated the syntax and vocabulary are than modern popular fiction.
The discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates are interesting because my gut reaction was "yeah, that would never get a huge audience today". But then I thought about it more and realized that long-form interview podcasts, often with academics or journalists, are extremely popular right now. In a way, aren't Ezra Klein and Lex Fridman episodes the modern day version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?
The open question is how many people pay attention when consuming those. But I suppose that’s also an open question with the debates themselves! We don’t really know what percentage of the crowd in attendance was there to engage in ideas or just to have a good time because everyone they knew was going.
Great points raised in this piece. I agree about the importance of debate. In the 80’s there was a series of debates I believe on PBS called “The Constitution, That Delicate Balance”. It is still easily accessed on line or from libraries and in my view is a model of liberal debate featuring former presidents, teachers, senators, judges, educators etc debating important Constitutional issues.
A counterargument by Joseph Heath, a political philosopher at the University of Toronto. He observes that there's a huge difference between intuitive and analytical thinking, and that politics based on what's intuitively obvious - populism, basically - looks very different from politics based on analytical reasoning. https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
“An acceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style.”
A specific example, the connection between populism and illiberalism:
"Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.)
"Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the 'logic of persecutors': 'that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.'
"The same feat of abstraction is involved in many other liberal protections. For example, populists often complain about lawyers 'defending criminals.' It requires a cognitively decoupled representation to see that lawyers defend people who are accused of a crime, and even if many of these people are in fact criminals, one cannot describe them as such until after that determination has been made, through a procedure that requires legal representation. Similarly, populists find conflict of interest rules extremely difficult to follow, because these rules are typically designed to avoid putting people into situations in which their judgment *might* be improperly influenced. This hypothetical construct is unavailable to intuition, creating a strong desire to permit the behaviour so long as it is not *actually* bad."
Reading might not "save" democracy but it certainly will not do it any harm. Learning and becoming more understanding of others is one of the most valuable elements of the social capital that derives of democratic life. Amartya Sen definitely made this argument. So too has Martha Nussbaum.
The classes I taught in college were filled with interaction, debate, simulation and conversation. Even so, I learned after nearly 50 years not every student wanted to engage in that manner--although I tried to draw them forward into the conversation. But--the combination of reading--and the classroom, led to exponential increases in learning and empowerment of students around ideas as valuable in and of themselves. Reading was the "power broker" in the end.
What I learned is that reading--and especially with a class and as a community--deepens the possibility of creative thought, critical thinking and imagination. Especially in classes touching on politics--learning to appreciate the human imagination is central to learning--and democracy. Martha Nussbaum's development of the idea of the narrative imagination argued that democratic citizenship flourishes in a context where our human capacities for self examination are developed through learning. I understand the author's aim to reconsider how we understand the value of reading--but we devalue reading at our peril as a democracy. Especially in these times. That devaluation is a mistake. Reading might not "save" democracy, but the loss of reading could very well be toxic to a free society. Why do authoritarians want to control what we read, see, say and imagine? Dictators always want to kill the imagination of people.
Long form scholarly texts, fiction and essays (like the one here in this substack) are vital to democratic dialogue and shared understanding. Moreover, when we read together we create a community of common understanding and dialogue.
"But does that decline necessitate democratic decline?"
“The liberal world by definition is literate,” and argued that the inverse is also true.
Strongly disagree. We are in an age of data, and the future of informing the public is with data, not descriptive storytelling. The checks and balances in a democracy are not dependent on a nation of literary geniuses. If a president rises to power based on charisma rather than the public reading in-depth about their career or agenda, that is fine. The key thing is that he or she chooses well-qualified individuals to run the Federal Reserve, DoD, and other institutions, not partisan hacks.
Suppose you run a media company and you need to keep the public informed when attention spans are at an all-time low. Stop being cynical about it and think of a way to do it. You can quantify how trustworthy politicians are, and this will give voters the most important thing they need.
My writing on Sousveillance makes the case for this, and I even started rating potential 2028 candidates on trust using PolitiFact data myself. Spread the word please!
I hope not. And what then of the human imagination? I think that human beings are essentially storytelling creatures, and this is how we live, thrive, and build communities. Relationships and love require our stories. Friendship is about stories. Why do we live--to create raw data? Data do not do that. (Rough sentence to write). Data alone--flat and unblinking, are nothing without the human imagination telling what it means in a story. Without music, and story, I don't know what being human is all about. Music and stories are the human experience. Where is the fun in "informing" folks with "data."
I am not sure what you mean by "traditional media." Like Hannah Arendt's ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, (I don't normally think of that as "media" but I suppose so), or do you mean the CBS Nightly News?
Here is what you wrote--and so I think I reacted to this:
"Strongly disagree. We are in an age of data, and the future of informing the public is with data, not descriptive storytelling. The checks and balances in a democracy are not dependent on a nation of literary geniuses. If a president rises to power based on charisma rather than the public reading in-depth about their career or agenda, that is fine."
I think "literary geniuses" is asking too much. But people who read, who appreciate ideas and learning, and are capable of developing what Martha Nussbaum called "the narrative imagination" is of importance to healthy democratic polities. I agree with Danielle Allen, (JUSTICE BY MEANS OF DEMOCRACY; and OUR DECLARATION), we are all capable of some development of these modest skills--and reaping the rewards. I don't think it's "fine" that a democratic nation in the 21st Century fails to continually expand the knowledge base of citizens--and hence elects a goon to the presidency--twice.. It is an age of disinformation and misinformation--as much and perhaps more than data. An active appreciation for the value of history--and not allowing history to be sodomized by dictators--is possible. People must be able to discriminate truth from falsehood.
I'm in favor of all those things, but those of us who read history and follow political news closely will probably not make up the majority of the electorate any time soon. By quantifying trust, I am trying to provide more incentive for politicians to be honest. We don't have strong enough of a mechanism for that today.
I have a series of posts under the topic of sousveillance that I encourage you to read, explaining why a dashboard like this is important. Feel free to comment on any of those posts with your own thoughts. We can continue the conversation there.
People used to consider the decline of classical music--long form acoustic music--as a societal failure. I love classical music, but even I shrug at that. It's not everyone's thing. Does it need to be?
Jerusalem, can we please get more of the Mad Libs series (e.g. Bruenig v. Piper)
Your podcast with MattY is fine and all, but hearing two takesters extemporize is a very different thing than the intellectual algebraic notation that is published discursive correspondence.
I wrote a small blog post on this exact same subject a few days ago and am really impressed with how much further you were able to take it.
"The classes that taught me the most at university were the ones that forced me to contend with other people’s ideas in real time. They were also the ones that made me want to do the readings."
Fire! Extremely relatable!
As you were exploring, perhaps another way of putting it is that our aspirational reading is more about the substitution effect than any particular novel-encoded information we wish to learn.
This was great. I think what the literary and scholarly-debate traditions share — but which the television, 'morning radio', and short-form-video traditions do not — is the extension and refinement of the train of attention out into sufficient breadth to form a world-model.
Interestingly, I can quantify this a little bit: I came of age in the professional Magic: The Gathering community where there was an astounding amount of print content people regularly consumed to get a sense of metagames and matchups. Now it's virtually all video. And consequently, the density function of people at tournaments with robust model-level understandings of the dynamics of what's going on is way, way down — even as the level of overall talent remains as high or higher. Exposure, and the ability to solitaire, is more refined than ever. But 'theoretical understanding' is vastly lower, and is exploitable.
I remember doing something similar when theory crafting WoW
Oh hell yeah. Takes me back!
Not sure if this is still going on, but when I was in med school there was a big focus on making doctors more empathetic and kind and just better people by exposing us to humanities. Meanwhile right after med school most residents work 80+ hours a week and we are surprised when these sleep deprived residents working an intense 80 hour week and dealing with lean staffing standards (i.e. covering a lot of patients at once, meaning it’s going to take awhile for many patients to be seen) are cranky and seem overly efficiency focused! I don’t think reading is going to be the answer to that…
"< latest tech outrage > is why we need to force all these STEM bros to read books! they would be empathetic if only they'd take one (1) humanities class!!!!"
If only Peter Thiel and Alex Karp had studied the humanities, they would not be techno-fascists!
I swear, the number of one time humanities students who choose not to engage with the human condition is mind-boggling.
This essay feels like it's confusing a lot of things. I don't think anyone is arguing that the down turn in reading is monocausal. But more that the change is indicative and descriptive of other things occurring.
When we turn from essays and books to TV and short form video not only does the medium change, but the types of stuff made tends to change.
It's not that populism and extremism can't exist without video, but that video encourages populist thought.
I stopped watching TV news probably 15+ years ago for precisely this reason, it's all 30 second sound bytes, no deep analysis and discussion.
And short form video and social media has just ramped this problem up even further. No deep discussions just a quick meme
Side note, I remember reading the Tarzan series in Middle School. I decided to revisit it last year and it struck me how much more complicated the syntax and vocabulary are than modern popular fiction.
We really are dumbing stuff down
There is an error above. You repeated the phrase "Consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates:" twice in this article.
The discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates are interesting because my gut reaction was "yeah, that would never get a huge audience today". But then I thought about it more and realized that long-form interview podcasts, often with academics or journalists, are extremely popular right now. In a way, aren't Ezra Klein and Lex Fridman episodes the modern day version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?
The open question is how many people pay attention when consuming those. But I suppose that’s also an open question with the debates themselves! We don’t really know what percentage of the crowd in attendance was there to engage in ideas or just to have a good time because everyone they knew was going.
Good question.
Great points raised in this piece. I agree about the importance of debate. In the 80’s there was a series of debates I believe on PBS called “The Constitution, That Delicate Balance”. It is still easily accessed on line or from libraries and in my view is a model of liberal debate featuring former presidents, teachers, senators, judges, educators etc debating important Constitutional issues.
A counterargument by Joseph Heath, a political philosopher at the University of Toronto. He observes that there's a huge difference between intuitive and analytical thinking, and that politics based on what's intuitively obvious - populism, basically - looks very different from politics based on analytical reasoning. https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
“An acceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style.”
A specific example, the connection between populism and illiberalism:
"Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.)
"Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the 'logic of persecutors': 'that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.'
"The same feat of abstraction is involved in many other liberal protections. For example, populists often complain about lawyers 'defending criminals.' It requires a cognitively decoupled representation to see that lawyers defend people who are accused of a crime, and even if many of these people are in fact criminals, one cannot describe them as such until after that determination has been made, through a procedure that requires legal representation. Similarly, populists find conflict of interest rules extremely difficult to follow, because these rules are typically designed to avoid putting people into situations in which their judgment *might* be improperly influenced. This hypothetical construct is unavailable to intuition, creating a strong desire to permit the behaviour so long as it is not *actually* bad."
Reading might not "save" democracy but it certainly will not do it any harm. Learning and becoming more understanding of others is one of the most valuable elements of the social capital that derives of democratic life. Amartya Sen definitely made this argument. So too has Martha Nussbaum.
The classes I taught in college were filled with interaction, debate, simulation and conversation. Even so, I learned after nearly 50 years not every student wanted to engage in that manner--although I tried to draw them forward into the conversation. But--the combination of reading--and the classroom, led to exponential increases in learning and empowerment of students around ideas as valuable in and of themselves. Reading was the "power broker" in the end.
What I learned is that reading--and especially with a class and as a community--deepens the possibility of creative thought, critical thinking and imagination. Especially in classes touching on politics--learning to appreciate the human imagination is central to learning--and democracy. Martha Nussbaum's development of the idea of the narrative imagination argued that democratic citizenship flourishes in a context where our human capacities for self examination are developed through learning. I understand the author's aim to reconsider how we understand the value of reading--but we devalue reading at our peril as a democracy. Especially in these times. That devaluation is a mistake. Reading might not "save" democracy, but the loss of reading could very well be toxic to a free society. Why do authoritarians want to control what we read, see, say and imagine? Dictators always want to kill the imagination of people.
Long form scholarly texts, fiction and essays (like the one here in this substack) are vital to democratic dialogue and shared understanding. Moreover, when we read together we create a community of common understanding and dialogue.
"But does that decline necessitate democratic decline?"
“The liberal world by definition is literate,” and argued that the inverse is also true.
Strongly disagree. We are in an age of data, and the future of informing the public is with data, not descriptive storytelling. The checks and balances in a democracy are not dependent on a nation of literary geniuses. If a president rises to power based on charisma rather than the public reading in-depth about their career or agenda, that is fine. The key thing is that he or she chooses well-qualified individuals to run the Federal Reserve, DoD, and other institutions, not partisan hacks.
Suppose you run a media company and you need to keep the public informed when attention spans are at an all-time low. Stop being cynical about it and think of a way to do it. You can quantify how trustworthy politicians are, and this will give voters the most important thing they need.
My writing on Sousveillance makes the case for this, and I even started rating potential 2028 candidates on trust using PolitiFact data myself. Spread the word please!
https://turingpolice.substack.com/p/the-case-for-sousveillance
https://turingpolice.substack.com/p/putting-my-money-where-my-mouth-is
I hope not. And what then of the human imagination? I think that human beings are essentially storytelling creatures, and this is how we live, thrive, and build communities. Relationships and love require our stories. Friendship is about stories. Why do we live--to create raw data? Data do not do that. (Rough sentence to write). Data alone--flat and unblinking, are nothing without the human imagination telling what it means in a story. Without music, and story, I don't know what being human is all about. Music and stories are the human experience. Where is the fun in "informing" folks with "data."
All that isn't going away, its about scoring/rating/judging politicians, that's all. Traditional media will still be there.
I am not sure what you mean by "traditional media." Like Hannah Arendt's ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, (I don't normally think of that as "media" but I suppose so), or do you mean the CBS Nightly News?
Here is what you wrote--and so I think I reacted to this:
"Strongly disagree. We are in an age of data, and the future of informing the public is with data, not descriptive storytelling. The checks and balances in a democracy are not dependent on a nation of literary geniuses. If a president rises to power based on charisma rather than the public reading in-depth about their career or agenda, that is fine."
I think "literary geniuses" is asking too much. But people who read, who appreciate ideas and learning, and are capable of developing what Martha Nussbaum called "the narrative imagination" is of importance to healthy democratic polities. I agree with Danielle Allen, (JUSTICE BY MEANS OF DEMOCRACY; and OUR DECLARATION), we are all capable of some development of these modest skills--and reaping the rewards. I don't think it's "fine" that a democratic nation in the 21st Century fails to continually expand the knowledge base of citizens--and hence elects a goon to the presidency--twice.. It is an age of disinformation and misinformation--as much and perhaps more than data. An active appreciation for the value of history--and not allowing history to be sodomized by dictators--is possible. People must be able to discriminate truth from falsehood.
I'm in favor of all those things, but those of us who read history and follow political news closely will probably not make up the majority of the electorate any time soon. By quantifying trust, I am trying to provide more incentive for politicians to be honest. We don't have strong enough of a mechanism for that today.
I have a series of posts under the topic of sousveillance that I encourage you to read, explaining why a dashboard like this is important. Feel free to comment on any of those posts with your own thoughts. We can continue the conversation there.
https://sousveillance-trust-scores-2028.netlify.app/
https://turingpolice.substack.com/t/sousveillance
People used to consider the decline of classical music--long form acoustic music--as a societal failure. I love classical music, but even I shrug at that. It's not everyone's thing. Does it need to be?
Jerusalem, can we please get more of the Mad Libs series (e.g. Bruenig v. Piper)
Your podcast with MattY is fine and all, but hearing two takesters extemporize is a very different thing than the intellectual algebraic notation that is published discursive correspondence.
I wrote a small blog post on this exact same subject a few days ago and am really impressed with how much further you were able to take it.
"The classes that taught me the most at university were the ones that forced me to contend with other people’s ideas in real time. They were also the ones that made me want to do the readings."
Fire! Extremely relatable!
As you were exploring, perhaps another way of putting it is that our aspirational reading is more about the substitution effect than any particular novel-encoded information we wish to learn.