As someone who likes to read, I have always been sensitive to how often reading is pathologized. It’s not regarded as an activity in its own right but as avoidance of activity. One couldn’t possibly enjoy it for its own sake — something that its ardent defenders seem to inadvertently confirm — so it must be a pose or strategy, a deflection. It is construed as anti-social and self-involved, a gesture of refusal.
I really enjoyed reading this! ‘Thinking your way through a piece of writing without an interface overlay to expedite your engagement and turn it into an experience is usually “where the ideas come from.” ‘ - this sentiment really resonated with me. So much of what people are trying to do with LLMs in the name of freeing users up from “menial tasks” for more “creative work” suffers from this conceit of not realising that thinking through stuff and doing stuff that is perceived as menial is vital for ideas to develop and have room to breathe before being rejected or acted on. Thank you for writing this, you articulated something I’ve been dwelling on for a while now but almost no one seems to be talking about (?)
Same thing for Blinkist, which is an app that offers extreme abstracts of many non-fiction books. These abstracts were done by PhD supposedly. So you could read the essence of like 5 business books a day and have time to become the biggest business icon in the history of history.
Thing is, in order to get this stuff into my brain in any usable way, time taken to read/think etc. is a very important factor. So reading the book takes longer than reading the Blinkist abstract so I stand a better change of remembering anything later on. Doing note on the margins, or writing up your own notes on paper, in your journal, in your Zettelkasten or external brain takes even more time, but generelly helps you even better to remember what you actually read and wrote or at least remember that you wrote and read something.
Also, reading and learning new knowledge is joy to me. Why cut it short?
Oh man, as someone who's visually impaired and therefore reads everything via text-to-speech, I really thought ChatPDF would be an advanced OCR system that could finally handle making scientific notation legible for the blind. Alas! But, it's a good idea, I will try it with one of these AI tools.
I really enjoyed reading this! ‘Thinking your way through a piece of writing without an interface overlay to expedite your engagement and turn it into an experience is usually “where the ideas come from.” ‘ - this sentiment really resonated with me. So much of what people are trying to do with LLMs in the name of freeing users up from “menial tasks” for more “creative work” suffers from this conceit of not realising that thinking through stuff and doing stuff that is perceived as menial is vital for ideas to develop and have room to breathe before being rejected or acted on. Thank you for writing this, you articulated something I’ve been dwelling on for a while now but almost no one seems to be talking about (?)
Same thing for Blinkist, which is an app that offers extreme abstracts of many non-fiction books. These abstracts were done by PhD supposedly. So you could read the essence of like 5 business books a day and have time to become the biggest business icon in the history of history.
Thing is, in order to get this stuff into my brain in any usable way, time taken to read/think etc. is a very important factor. So reading the book takes longer than reading the Blinkist abstract so I stand a better change of remembering anything later on. Doing note on the margins, or writing up your own notes on paper, in your journal, in your Zettelkasten or external brain takes even more time, but generelly helps you even better to remember what you actually read and wrote or at least remember that you wrote and read something.
Also, reading and learning new knowledge is joy to me. Why cut it short?
Oh man, as someone who's visually impaired and therefore reads everything via text-to-speech, I really thought ChatPDF would be an advanced OCR system that could finally handle making scientific notation legible for the blind. Alas! But, it's a good idea, I will try it with one of these AI tools.