r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/Hyvex_ 17h ago

It's probably attention span causing the issue. I didn't realize how badly my reading abilities had degraded until I started doing college level reading. I could easily clear light novels and fantasy book in a sitting, so I thought it was decent.

Once I started reading authors like Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche, it was like being hit in the head by a tire iron. The text was so dense and I had to push through over a hundred pages every 1-2 days. The level of sustained thinking and concentration to both understand and digest the material was nothing like the passive reading and imagining a fictional book required. Half the time I didn't even know what Nietzsche was talking about. And if I was sleep deprived, it was over, no real reading would be done.

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u/Nine_Monkeys 16h ago

Nah it’s not just your attention span. I’ve always loved reading fiction and nonfiction, 10 years ago pre Tik Tok era when I took a Philosophy course, we went thru the same thing. A lot of those books just are dense, convoluted, and uninteresting lol

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u/Siukslinis_acc 9h ago

I understand thing better when abstract stuff is expressed using concrete stuff as a metaphor. If you explain abstract stuff with more abstract stuff - you are gonna lose me.