I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.

Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...

Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP

A landmark study of this, pertaining to literary agents, was just published today: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/literary-agents-dont-read-h...

If an adult English speaker cannot understand the opening of Bleak House - quotes given elsewhere in this thread - they are effectively unable to access the bulk of English literature.

This is not someone who belongs in a university English course, this is someone in need of remedial English lessons.

If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the results would be perfectly acceptable. Why would you test literacy, a very practical skill, using anything other than contemporary language, the kind that they actually use in their day to day?

The bar for any amount of academic discipline or rigor may as well be a stripe of masking tape on the floor.

[0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346

It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."

English students are students, they are in school to learn things they don't know, not demonstrate what they already know. Looking at the numbers it goes from 0% proficient as freshman to 50% as juniors, drops with seniors but seniors often seem to be an outlier in these sorts of studies, probably because they have a great deal on their mind with the major changes their life is about to undergo.

It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.

Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.

And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.

1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.

2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.

I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point.

If you read enough books, you'll reach "vote-for-Trump mental acumen" again, if nothing else just to rile up the semi-literates.

Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge

I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.

Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.

When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.

- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.

- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.

- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.

This seems extremely detached from reality. Just to give you an anecdotal example, I used to love reading books as a kid, but you'd be extremely hard pressed to find me reading one now. Clearly my reading habits have changed, and so it cannot be some intrinsic property written in my fate (which seems to be assumed to exist in the quoted framing).

Conversely, book purchases wouldn't fall or rise, especially over long timeframes, if there weren't changes in reading habits. It just doesn't make sense to portray people as these immovable objects, whose desire to read has been inscribed into them at birth.

> Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward.

When reading novels for pleasure is not among your hobbies, it most likely will be. You bet I don't often want to read e.g. documentation: I just want to get my hands on the magic incantations or magic phrases / values required, and move on with my day.

But this is true even for literature class, with its mandatory readings. I was one of the more naive folks in my class, so I'd make an earnest attempt at reading through those things. At the end, that only mattered to the extent that I can now tell you it was a complete chore. And the "reward" at the end of those was good test scores of course - something others could replicate by just relying on, then manually written, summaries.

> one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

It is at most only an opinion that there is no understanding there, and so is that the impression the person would have about their understanding is false. Understanding is not a binary property, despite what e.g. the anti-AI crowd would make one believe, and you're no mind reader. I think that's pretty agreeable at least.

I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was going to type something into an LLM, they could have typed it into a search bar. People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read! They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!

I was correct. Now we have a costly LLM implementation and have our time wasted with questions that are already answered.

I have negative interest in what LLMs write.

edit:

> [...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.

Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to 100%

I'm not convinced this is providing any value in the way you're implying. When people talk about the cognitive benefits of writing, what they mean is writing which makes you organize your thoughts, and notice when they are messy and disjointed. I think a majority of the writing people do online is not of that form: instead it takes the form of emotional outbursts which essentially go directly from the amygdala to the fingers and barely involve the higher brain functions at all, much less trigger the kind of introspection and reflection that people mean when they say writing is good for you.

In other words, just as not all reading is equally valuable, I don't think all writing is either and I think almost all Internet writing is of the low-value kind.

Is this a feeling, or something you know from statistics?

Many of the teens I know (I'm a teacher) aren't writing blog posts, or even comments on Reddit. They're watching YouTube videos and not interacting back with anything more than a thumbs up.

Sure, some are writing on anime subreddits or whatever, but I don't want to make generalizations for what teens are doing across the US or the rest of the Western world without some kind of statistics.

If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate description might be a random sample of phrases that spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.

Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?

The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.

> But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you.

I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.

Of course.

I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech.

What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.

Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth.

With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.

Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.

We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently.

For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.

> I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.

They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones radar that they'll actually pay attention?

I don't know that what you've described is any different now than 20 years ago when I was in high school. People struggled to read aloud texts like plays or classic literature. I would use that as a bar for complex prose that benefits from good narration; often the point was to encounter unfamiliar words or meter and to read with the purpose of critical analysis. A friend of mine is an author and we did a group reading of a play they'd written. Quite hard to do off the bat. Similarly if you've ever tried to DM a role-playing game like DnD, where the text you read is semi-randomly chosen based on what the characters decided to do (also, will you role-play dialog?).

I've worked in academia for 10+ years at this point. You can tell almost immediately if a presenter has had practice, knows their material or is comfortable speaking in public. Lecturers and professors are, unsurprisingly, often very comfortable giving presentations and there are people who live for conferences and working groups. We're required to read dense material frequently. Understanding of a piece of work, or the attention span required to ingest a scientific paper, does not necessarily mean you could read it aloud fluently.

https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs

While theoretically possible with non-linear media like videos and audio playback, the fluidity of reading is far superior. Thus, passive consumption leads to many fragments of ideas remaining atomized and not sticking. In contrast, reading allows one to efficiently stitch numerous ideas together.

The point of reading is not to become convinced or apprehend a single summarizable point. Rather, it is to fill one's memory banks with thoughts, experiences and ideas that can be combined with other ones and synthesize new information.

Contrast wandering though a botanical garden, reading labels and looking at plants one the one hand. On the other hand, a slow-moving bus that rolls continuously through the garden. It may pause from time to time, but mostly you stay on the path and watch things go by from the same distance. Both "get you through" the garden, but the self-pacing allows a personal connection to the information.

So it would be convenient for a farmer to have his animals illiterate, yet capable of listening passively to commands over speakers. And to the farmer, it would be very inconvenient for these animals to learn to read and explore material on their own which would eventually lead them to an awareness that they don't want to be fenced in, farmed, and eaten. So you can see why some questionable leaders are comfortable with illiteracy as a means of control. While others seek to empower humanity through encouraging reading.