Latest / Armstrong & Getty One More Thing / Reading is Magic, Part 2

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Reading is Magic, Part 2 · Armstrong & Getty One More Thing

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Speaker 1: Part two of Reading is Magic. It's one more thing.
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Speaker 2: I'm th.
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Speaker 3: I love reading practically more than just about anything on earth,
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Speaker 3: and at this point in my life and I came
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Speaker 3: across a good thing on why literature is good for
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Speaker 3: your brain.
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Speaker 4: I haven't brought it on the air because I don't
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Speaker 4: know if anybody cares, but there are claims and it
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Speaker 4: kind of fits in with what you were talking about
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Speaker 4: yesterday and today that literature does things to your brain
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Speaker 4: that are good for you overall. But most people don't
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Speaker 4: read literature, and they do fine in the world and
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Speaker 4: did before literature came along, and well after it's gone.
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Speaker 4: So I don't know, I don't know what any think
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Speaker 4: of that.
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Speaker 2: You got to define your terms, do fine and stuff. Well,
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Speaker 2: it depends on your personality type of thing. But anyway,
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Speaker 2: if you missed yesterday is One More Thing podcast, just
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Speaker 2: grab it and listen to it now and then this
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Speaker 2: is part two of that discussion. Long story short, absolutely
0:59
Speaker 2: brilliant piece of writing by a fellow by the name
1:01
Speaker 2: of Sam Chris with a KKR I SS who's talking
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Speaker 2: about scientists from the Soviet Union who went into a
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Speaker 2: remote village that was completely illiterate and found to his
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Speaker 2: shock that the people had a tremendous problem thinking abstractly
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Speaker 2: at all. And again we covered that the last time around,
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Speaker 2: meaning abstractly, Oh my gosh, well they Well, we gave
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Speaker 2: a bunch of examples yesterday, and presumably people have just
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Speaker 2: listened to that. So I don't want to go through
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Speaker 2: it again, anything outside of their direct personal experience, the
1:45
Speaker 2: ability to imagine other things and other ways of approaching whatever.
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Speaker 2: But I want to start with this note from Mike
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Speaker 2: Lawyer from Chicago, longtime friend of mine and of the shows.
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Speaker 2: He really enjoyed it, He said, I wanted to share
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Speaker 2: something I learned as an undergrad as a chemistry major.
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Speaker 2: Most of us thought very literally, using mathematics and science
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Speaker 2: and not really thinking outside the box because we were
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Speaker 2: looking for an absolute answer. My favorite chemistry professor, Steven Zumdahl,
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Speaker 2: pointed out that the great scientists also could think abstractly.
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Speaker 2: Michael Faraday, for instance, discovered benzene, which is a ring
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Speaker 2: shaped organic compound. Nobody could figure out scientifically what the
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Speaker 2: structure was because the number of carbons and hydrogen didn't
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Speaker 2: add up properly. Faraday had a dream of a snake
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Speaker 2: circling around and grabbing its tail, and then he thought, wow,
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Speaker 2: maybe it's ring shaped, and he took a look, and
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Speaker 2: sure enough. The professor then explained how an appreciation for
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Speaker 2: art in music helps us advance our scientific knowledge.
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Speaker 1: So that's a good professor.
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Speaker 4: My son's good at one of my kids, and predicators
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Speaker 4: really good at that abstract thinking where I will do
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Speaker 4: something and it's embarrassing. Why do you do it that way?
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Speaker 4: I said, what if you did this first, then that
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Speaker 4: that would be a lot better, And I just never
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Speaker 4: thought of it.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, funny might go to a consultant for that, as
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Speaker 2: my wife. So anyway, we ended up the last yesterday
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Speaker 2: is one more thing with a discussion of how in
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Speaker 2: these remote, completely illiterate areas, there were formerly scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, poets,
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Speaker 2: et cetera, but those folks had vanished from the world
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Speaker 2: along with these sophisticated literary culture, et cetera. So anyway,
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Speaker 2: Chris writes today, the same thing seems to be happening
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Speaker 2: to us. The kids can't read. I don't mean they're
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Speaker 2: incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words,
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Speaker 2: although an increasing proportion of them can't do that either.
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Speaker 2: In the US, literacy peaked around twenty fourteen has been
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Speaker 2: sliding since. Forty percent of fourth graders have below basic
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Speaker 2: reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any means
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Speaker 2: from a written text. The number of illiterate students has
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Speaker 2: been rising every year since twenty fourteen. Part of that
4:05
Speaker 2: is rampant illegal immigration, but anyway, don't want to get
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Speaker 2: hung up on that. But even when students can perform
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Speaker 2: the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make
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Speaker 2: their minds start working in text like ways. It's an
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Speaker 2: entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes. And
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Speaker 2: when they come to the written word, they come to
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Speaker 2: it from the outside. And he gets into how professors
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Speaker 2: at elite universities increasingly report their students are no longer
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Speaker 2: capable of reading an entire novel or even a thirty
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Speaker 2: page extract. Some of them have difficulty making it through
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Speaker 2: a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they're
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Speaker 2: willing to pay three hundred thousand dollars for the privilege
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Speaker 2: of dumping an entire text into chat GPT and submitting
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Speaker 2: its response as an essay. Probably the most alarming index
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Speaker 2: of this was a study in which a group of
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Speaker 2: English majors holy cow at two well regarded public universities
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Speaker 2: in Kansas.
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Speaker 1: I think we can guess what they are.
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Speaker 2: It's not like they're se The Kennes were expected to
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Speaker 2: read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles
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Speaker 2: Dickens and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening.
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Speaker 2: Only five percent of the students could produce a detailed
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Speaker 2: literal understanding of the text one out of twenty. The
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Speaker 2: rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch
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Speaker 2: of half understood phrases, or could not comprehend.
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Speaker 1: Anything at all. Yipes in specifico.
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Speaker 2: One particular stumbling block was the novel's third sentence, which
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Speaker 2: describes London in December.
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Speaker 1: I will read that sentence to you now.
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Speaker 2: As much mud in the streets as if the waters
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Speaker 2: had but newly retired from the face of the earth,
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Speaker 2: and it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus
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Speaker 2: forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard
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Speaker 2: Upholburn Hill. The students found this figure of language impossible.
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Speaker 2: They can only read the sentence with the assumption that
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Speaker 2: Dickens was described the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile
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Speaker 2: in Victorian London. You know, in their defense, and boy,
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Speaker 2: I love kicking the young. But in their defense, words
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Speaker 2: like fantastic or in this case wonderful had a different
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Speaker 2: meaning at the time.
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Speaker 1: And you can get hung up on that.
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Speaker 2: A little bit, because he means wonderful as in, like
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Speaker 2: we would use the word astounding, it would not be
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Speaker 2: astounding to meet a megalosaurus forty feet long or so,
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Speaker 2: waddling like an elephant teen lizard up Holburn Hill.
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Speaker 1: I think they might get that more.
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Speaker 2: But anyway, they couldn't get that.
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Speaker 1: It was a metaphor.
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Speaker 2: One respondent glossed it like this quote, it's probably some
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Speaker 2: kind of an animal or something or another. So yep,
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Speaker 2: I think we've encountered some kind of an animal these
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Speaker 2: characters have met in the street. The study assessed this
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Speaker 2: person is a competent rather than a problematic reader, because
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Speaker 2: they did at least managed to form an idea of
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Speaker 2: what the text meant, even if it was wrong.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: And then he gets closer to his point. He points
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Speaker 2: out that Bleak House is not an elitest text. It
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Speaker 2: was mass entertainment at the time and When Dickens visited
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Speaker 2: America in eighteen sixty seven eighteen sixty seven, over one
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Speaker 2: hundred thousand people paid to see him.
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Speaker 4: Speak, often called the world's first worldwide celebrity.
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Speaker 2: Dickens, Yeah, yeah, anyway. Today, a person studying English literature
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Speaker 2: at a degree level responds to his work in essentially
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Speaker 2: the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the
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Speaker 2: nineteen thirties, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.
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Speaker 4: I'm going to say to my kids the next time
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Speaker 4: I'm disappointed in them, You're like an illiterate Huzbek peasant
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Speaker 4: from the whenever the eighteenth century.
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Speaker 1: Your face isn't.
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Speaker 2: Illiterate, but ho'sbek peasant in the nineteen thirties, they'd replied,
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Speaker 2: And here it comes. The situation is not likely to
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Speaker 2: get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new
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Speaker 2: generation of people, progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing.
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Speaker 2: In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to
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Speaker 2: inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman's Entertaining Ourselves to Death excellent
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Speaker 2: book I read at the time. Now it seems almost benign.
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Speaker 2: Our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability
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Speaker 2: to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without
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Speaker 2: distractedly poking at their phones, as if mad Men were
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Speaker 2: a kind of penitential mental gruel.
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Speaker 1: Wow, that's some good writing.
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Speaker 2: I'm old enough to remember the first time I ever
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Speaker 2: went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to
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Speaker 2: have the same story. They love to read as children,
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Speaker 2: but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that
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Speaker 2: permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home. Interestingly, You're
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Speaker 2: kind of the opposite, aren't you.
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Speaker 4: I've had to work at it, though, Yeah, true, Yeah,
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Speaker 4: I had to make it. It had to be a goal
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Speaker 4: was to reintroduce myself to reading and long form reading
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Speaker 4: and do it on a regular basis, because when I
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Speaker 4: first started back up again a couple of years ago,
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Speaker 4: it is hard, really hard.
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Speaker 2: And I think, to mister Chris's point, I'm reading Tim
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Speaker 2: Sanderfer's fabulous new book Proclaiming Liberty. I want to say
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Speaker 2: declaring Liberty because Liberty Proclaire. I finally got a right
9:11
Speaker 2: proclaiming liberty, and it was a bit of a struggle
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Speaker 2: at first. After about five ten minutes, I get into
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Speaker 2: the groove and I'm really good at it.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, you got to break through that first few minutes.
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Speaker 4: That's because I was a voracious reader.
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Speaker 2: Like for my entire life, a kid, a youngster, a
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Speaker 2: college student who's all you know, most of their intellectual
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Speaker 2: consciousness has been post internet and god help them post smartphone.
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Speaker 4: And you've probably never had. Reading is an enjoyable experience
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Speaker 4: ever once in your life. So what would draw you
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Speaker 4: to it?
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Speaker 2: So they're not waking up an old muscle like I am,
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Speaker 2: They're trying to develop a completely new one.
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Speaker 4: I'm so excited my son finding a book that can
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Speaker 4: grab people, you know, getting them into reading is the
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Speaker 4: challenge really, to get started, I think. And my son,
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Speaker 4: who's super into dinosaurs, is reading the original Jurassic Park book,
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Speaker 4: which is supposed to be really good. I've never read it,
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Speaker 4: the actual book, Michael Crichton. Anyway, he loves it. He
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Speaker 4: can't he can't stop reading it. I'm just so happy
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Speaker 4: thenk God, he's reading an actual.
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Speaker 1: Book, all right. Here's the Wyatt matters.
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Speaker 4: And also their eyesight so good that they can sit
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Speaker 4: down with those paperbacks with those tiny little print in
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Speaker 4: a dimly lit room and read them, which I can't
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Speaker 4: do anymore.
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Speaker 1: Oh please, no, no speaking of torture.
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Speaker 2: Um bar Okay, here's why it matters, And I wish
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Speaker 2: we had. I suppose we have time to read the
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Speaker 2: whole thing, but I don't know if anybody wants to
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Speaker 2: hear it. But he points out that this is not
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Speaker 2: a world we're prepared for. Oh, he says, he talks
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Speaker 2: about what we just talked about kids who don't have
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Speaker 2: those muscles. Uh what about the cohorts? Uh, they can't
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Speaker 2: parse complex sentences. At least they can identify words. But
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Speaker 2: what about the cohorts who don't have a gaping hole
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Speaker 2: in their education at twelve?
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Speaker 1: But at six?
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Speaker 2: What happens when the baby's currently being raised by AI
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Speaker 2: power dolls grow up when it's their turn to govern
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Speaker 2: the world. This is not a world we're prepared for.
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Speaker 2: All democratic politics assume a literate population, people who are
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Speaker 2: willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of
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Speaker 2: world they want to live in. And I would add
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Speaker 2: in the ability to shape the future too, even if
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Speaker 2: they're not going to be in it. Without that, democracy
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Speaker 2: becomes a kind of tribal headcount or a struggle for
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Speaker 2: state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies
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Speaker 2: behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the
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Speaker 2: decline of literacy. For a growing course of people who
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Speaker 2: are in the Atlantic, we're recoiling into pre Enlightenment conditions.
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Speaker 1: Of absolute domination.
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Speaker 2: A population that can no longer think for itself will
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Speaker 2: end up voluntarily seeding power to strongmen or demagogues. The
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Speaker 2: end of literacy is the end of public reason. A
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Speaker 2: postliterate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness,
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Speaker 2: and people eating each other in the streets.
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Speaker 4: They um don't know if I'm sir, that that second
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Speaker 4: half will happen in a post literate world.
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Speaker 1: What to cannibalism?
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Speaker 4: If I had to bet, I'd bet probably we're going
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Speaker 4: to go that direction. Will we be a postliterate world?
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Speaker 4: One hundred percent? One hundred percent? Where if not? Basically,
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Speaker 4: they're already the age of reading lasted three hundred years
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Speaker 4: and it's over and it will never return.
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Speaker 2: There are many paragraphs to this, We'll post the entire
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Speaker 2: thing at Armstrong and Getty dot com.
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Speaker 1: I'm just going to hit you with his conclusion.
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Speaker 2: Getting back to Marshall McLuhan, I think McLuhan was right
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Speaker 2: that the postlitter age will have more in common with
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Speaker 2: primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that
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Speaker 2: produced it. After writing, we will once again live in
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Speaker 2: a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But
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Speaker 2: now our direct sensory experience won't be of the things
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Speaker 2: that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.
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Speaker 2: It's likely that before very long, absolutely all those images
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Speaker 2: will be generated by AI. In the same way that
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Speaker 2: Tolstovian peasant has a deep spiritual knowledge of the land,
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Speaker 2: we will have a deep spiritual knowledge of tungue, tungue, tongue, sahor.
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Speaker 2: I don't even know what that is. I hope I'm
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Speaker 2: allowed to say that on a podcast. I have a
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Speaker 2: feeling it's something very interneting. The politics of the future
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Speaker 2: will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded an empirical,
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Speaker 2: empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer
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Speaker 2: try to think outside of the things we can see.
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Speaker 2: It's just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.
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Speaker 4: Oh why, I don't see how this doesn't happen.
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Speaker 2: Therefore, those who control what we see are in control
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Speaker 2: of our entire perception of reality, which is kind of obvious.
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Speaker 4: I was watching an ad yesterday for some minor clothing outlet.
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Speaker 4: They couldn't have they're an upstart, they couldn't have a
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Speaker 4: ton of money to spend. They had this unbelievable ad
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Speaker 4: that was obviously AI, with the AI rugged man modeled
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Speaker 4: wearing their stuff and all that that I'm sure they
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Speaker 4: put together for free. And I thought, this is clearly
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Speaker 4: there'll be no human beings and practically anything soon, because
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Speaker 4: why would there be Why would you even have the
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Speaker 4: time to have somebody drive across town to film something
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Speaker 4: when you can just pick the man or woman, put
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Speaker 4: them in the clothes you want, have them say what
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Speaker 4: you want, and you're done. Yeah, this is much less
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Speaker 4: important than the discussion. But I heard a jingle on
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Speaker 4: the radio the other day and it was like not
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Speaker 4: a good one, like where did you get those singers?
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Speaker 2: And who wrote that? Like do you not read the papers?
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Speaker 2: I mean, do you not have access to the internet.
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Speaker 4: There's a Oh, you're thinking that humans made it, and
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Speaker 4: you're thinking, A I could have done a much better job.
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Speaker 2: It was like if a hardware store with two locations
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Speaker 2: in a very small city in America, had like hired
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Speaker 2: a couple of gals from the church choir and dashed
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Speaker 2: off a quick jingle.
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Speaker 1: It was just not good, dude.
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Speaker 4: Meanwhile, you heard of AI handsome crafts sounds like it
15:10
Speaker 4: came out of a La studio songs for our end
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Speaker 4: of our show every single day. Oh yeah yeah, but yeah,
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Speaker 4: with all that going on, no, nobody's going to read.
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Speaker 4: I'm one hundred people aren't going to read. They just aren't.
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Speaker 4: And that's never coming back. I can't even imagine the
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Speaker 4: scenario where that's ever going to come back.
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Speaker 2: And all they'll have is a deep spiritual knowledge of
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Speaker 2: tongue tongue tongue.
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Speaker 1: Sohre, are you gonna look that up real quick?
15:38
Speaker 4: I'm going to look that up us something obscenehing compelling.
15:43
Speaker 4: It's a sexual act in which you get a dog
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Speaker 4: and a woman and you can't say this.
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Speaker 1: Oh thank you. I like dogs and women, but I
15:51
Speaker 1: like to keep them separate.
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Speaker 2: Oh it appears to be an AI cartoon.
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Speaker 4: Character that's popular. Yeah, it's kind of funky looking. I
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Speaker 4: feel like I've seen that. Okay, my house be really popular. Yeah, Okay.
16:13
Speaker 4: The point is something young people.
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Speaker 1: Like speaking of being online.
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Speaker 2: Tungue tungue tongue SO who are sometimes shortened a tongue
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Speaker 2: tongue sho a or triple T, is a viral internet meme.
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Speaker 1: It was introduced blah blah blah.
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Speaker 2: The character has since been featured in many songs and
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Speaker 2: video games, including Steal a Brain, Rotten Fortnight.
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Speaker 4: I gotta throw that at my kids today, like just offhand,
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Speaker 4: like I know what it is.
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Speaker 1: What would play? It was tripled what would.
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Speaker 4: Tungue tungue tongue so? That's so. Think of this I
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Speaker 4: do with triple T. You'll never remember the name. Think
16:44
Speaker 4: of this, That's what I'll say. See if my high
16:46
Speaker 4: school son rolls his eyes at me so hard to
16:50
Speaker 4: get stuck in the back of his head, and then happens.
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Speaker 5: Sixty seven records that shit, it's six seven, he would
16:59
Speaker 5: jump on the car, throw himself into traffic.
17:03
Speaker 1: No, get it wrong, say seven six. That's what my
17:07
Speaker 1: parents were doing. Yeah.
17:08
Speaker 5: Anyway, as a young kid, I remember the school library
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Speaker 5: and teaching us the Dewey decimal system and the difference
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Speaker 5: between fiction and nonfiction books.
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Speaker 1: Those days are gone.
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Speaker 4: Well, I guess that's it.