And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.

Every generation is worried that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.

I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but that gets ignored).

It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.

Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."

And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."

Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.

imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control

but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements

For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.

And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.

1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...

And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!