What is reading - broadly defined?
I am interested in improving reading âbroadly definedâ - but what exactly does that mean?
Fortunately most people can read. It is a wonderful thing that over the last 200 years or so literacy has gone from around 12% to more like 90% (and more or less 100% percent in developed countries). So I donât mean the not-so-simple but widespread act of converting words to sounds that many people are interested in working on. Rather I mean the more expert or functional âgestaltâ forms of reading: that is, using the written word to do think and do things.
By @readwithai - Creating tools for reading and agency with Obsidian. Sharing my work and thoughts along the way
For my work, I want a good definition: meaningful for me and useful for the world, theoretically consistent enough to be of use for talking to other people, not so general that every conversation becomes an exercise in traversing philosophy under something is well defined enough to be useful, not so precise to be useless. You could broadly define reading as using information to act in the world - but then you are basically just defining living. Or you could talk about converting written symbols to speech, which doesnât really deal with understanding or application at all.
Why âreading: broadly definedâ matters
The world wants to lie to you. In a sense by being interested in âreadingâ, I am assertipng that there are problems or opportunites in the world that are not being served. There is really one big one here: the world lies and hides information from you and this information if often âin plain sightâ, if only you found the right sources, read deeply enough, thought about things.
Of course, itâs not just the world lying. You lie to yourself (particularly about things you donât know) - I guess pepole would call that guessing. Other people guess. Often information is unknown. But there is an element of laying there people will simplify in biased ways, pretend things are harder than they are or that there is only one way to do things - because thatâs what they had to do, or because thatâs how they think things should be done, or perhaps they just want to win an argument.
It has been striking to me how many basic unfairnesses or misleading simplifications you can correct or find out about just by finding the correct source and reading it.
The world in some sense has cheat codes - it works in particularly ways and if you do things in these ways things can be easier for you. One of the things that I have observed is even more that the reason that the world doesnât work they way it should is because these cheat codes exist. Organizations and people who would otherwise have to consider things do not have to because they are outsourced to other processes, the issue is that they often âforgetâ be it out of convenience these processes and become âpurely bureaucraticâ. I would go further to say that some pepole just demand that you do things âthe right wayâ.
Understanding these cheat codes is often the same as understanding how organizations think, what they value, and how there processes work. You will often find that something you think the world does not care about, is actually represented in a different way with different values.
Reading can help you understand people and organizations thinking, their values and how to make them do what you need and act more morally
Reading is a basic skill Separate from these psychology / sociology of knowledge there is the basic aim of efficiently working towards a goal. Again the âright way of doing something or think about somethingâ is often hidden. People often want to sell you on their solution rather than another solutoin.
A useful definition
So then our useful definition of reading includes finding the correct source, which may involve some degree of abstraction, analogies, understanding academic of professional formalizations, and seeing how this applies to your own thinking. Intelligently interacting and reconciling the worlds web of ideas with your own.
Tool that might help Reading broadly definedâ
AI might help I am not that sure that many people are interested in AI and reading. There have been some cursory âspeak with an AIâ type apps. AIs can currently provide (sometimes incorrect and often difficult to verify) context to things that you read. AIâs can help simplitify.
I thin the tools that might be useful could be more about intelligently *navigating* the written world and ideas and written words rather than replacing it.
Not everyting is AI There seems to be a tendency to see all problems solved in terms of AI - part of the issue is that peole donât yet know what AI is capable, people are betting of *everything* and money is just going into more and more hardware. It may be that AIs will magically solve all out problems, but it seems like an unlikely bet an oddly meaningless bet.
Assuming that AI does not magically immediately solve all our problems, the actual solution might look like a bybrid and AI and existing software technologies or just software technologies. Simple things like summarizing and travesing the knowledge graph faster could help. Or contextualizing one source with another source, or bring other peopleâs understaning to your own.
Additionally there is the skill and experience that education can provide.
Things that are not reading
Actually doing something is not reading (though it may involve reading). The world of AI potentially confuses things because the right context and the write prompts to the write model may help you read.
There is also a social world of how you get things of things like assertiveness and empathy that may be a more of an effect on getting what you want than reading. This can be complex to interact with and experience and well as understsanding matters.
There is also an economic world out there that will just solve your problems, often trying to make them as simple as possible for you - to the point of oversimplifying which giving you as simple understanding as possible. This is a good thing, and it is what much of the economic world trades it - giving you as simple solutions as possible. But some tasks and not simple and for that there is reading.