What We Already Knew About Reading and Intelligence(s)

[DontTreadOnMe]

Because the title is ableist.

I don't know about you, but I am growing so weary of all the words/meanings/labels they make up to segregate our worlds. 
Grouping us in every possible manner.   

I guess that is what is needed when people get dumbed down.  No more independent thinking.

[UltraBudgie]

I am going to say if people have trouble sitting still and focussing on something entertaining like a short story, imagine how much harder it is for them to sit in something like meditation and do single-minded focus (dharana), or go for no-mind temporarily. . . 

Reading is a good stepping stone to more intense mind training.

What annoys me is when I'm reading and people feel there's no problem at all about coming up to me and interrupting, because "I'm not doing anything". It seems all modern media is 10-second videos or 140 character snippets, so that's probably true if someone is scrolling TickTock or reading FaceBook, but actual reading requires immersion and often concentration and focus, and interrupting breaks that and is annoying.

Aargh no one understands; I'm going to go yell at a cloud.

[SurferSoul]

TLDR care to summarise? 

I first learned of that acronym on ATS 

The funny thing is even when some people do read they only seem to pick up on the bits that align with their preconceived notions. Must be a psychology thing. Guess that’s how targeted advertising works and why big data is such a commodity these days.

[UltraBudgie]

This is worth watching. Please do.

[UltraBudgie]

And as mentioned in the video, the first five paragraphs of Bleak House, for your critical enjoyment:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

It's not that inaccessible, is it?

[andy06shake]

I've always preferred books to movies or TV. Don't get me wrong I like a good movie, but there's just something about a book that's better. I have the equivalent of a small town library of actual books here at home and hundreds more on my Kindle.

As far as outsourcing tasks... I am sincerely shocked at the number of adults who can't do something as simple as putting in a new sink or counter tops or wiring in a ceiling fan. Replacing electrical outlets or light switches or even change the oil in their car.

People are becoming ignorant and lazy, eager to "just pay someone else to do it".

Yeah, books are always better than movies imho.

They tend to contain and provide more information for a start. 

I would point out through, where things like putting in new sinks, counter tops, wiring, or replacing electrical outlets are concerned.

The likes of YouTube DIY instructional videos can be a godsend if you are not a skilled tradesman.

So there are exceptions.

As to where AI will lead us, well, like you point out we are becoming ignorant and lazy as a race.

So it's apt to be in to a Zoo of sorts.

The kicker, i suppose, is whether or not it will be a better Zoo than TPTB provides?

[SurferSoul]

My favourite short story by Dickens is The Chimes, at first difficult to read, but then suddenly I was transported into to another time and place, I could feel the cold winter air biting at my skin, I could see the tower and hear the bell, as I bore silent witness to the scenes and imagery of the unfolding tale of a great author, mystic and visionary. Charles Dickens.

[sahgwa]

I don't know about you, but I am growing so weary of all the words/meanings/labels they make up to segregate our worlds. 
Grouping us in every possible manner.   

I guess that is what is needed when people get dumbed down.  No more independent thinking.

I know what you are saying but it was a funny joke.  :)
The woke version of the Stand: The Lay
It's good cuz its also a double entendre? :|

[sahgwa]

And as mentioned in the video, the first five paragraphs of Bleak House, for your critical enjoyment:


It's not that inaccessible, is it?

It paints a lovely picture with good juicy words.
BUT
Let us not forget the ol' chestnut: Dickens was paid by the word, so he used a lot of them on purpose!
Hence the introducing new characters every other page.

[UltraBudgie]

Yes I'm going to have to read more Dickens! Good stuff.

Hey, really, watch that video if you haven't! It's info-packed and totally over the target!