HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Cognition & "Active Reading"
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Phaedrus (dialogue)
1 min read
The article directly references Plato's Phaedrus and the myth of Theuth and Thamus about the invention of writing. Understanding this dialogue provides essential context for the critique of passive reading and the tension between oral and written discourse.
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Marginalia
10 min read
The article describes active reading practices including writing in margins. The history and intellectual tradition of marginalia as a form of scholarly engagement with texts directly supports the article's thesis about how readers interact with books.
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Turing test
12 min read
The article uses the phrase 'sub-Turing instantiation' to describe how active readers mentally simulate authors. Understanding Turing's original concept illuminates what DeLong means by creating a mental model of an author that can 'answer questions' but falls short of full intelligence.
From 2025-01-13 “very briefly noted”: here so I can quickly put my hands on it in the future...
“Active reading” has long been THE way that those super-skilled in utilizing the technologies of writing and printing we have had for 5000 and 500 years, respectively, to supercharge the intellectual powers these technologies enable. It is in sharp contrast to passive readings, in which the words wash over you—as in listening to a speech, but with your eyes rather than your ears. This form of passive reading has all the flaws Platon’s Sokrates puts in the mouth of King Thamos in his response to the God Theuth in the “Phaidros”—that it creates the trompe l’oeil appearance of thinking, but not the reality. (Not said in the Phaidros, but a subtext in much of Platon, is that the speechifyin’ rhetoric of the sophist suffers from much the same problem: rather than helping you think, the speeches of the demagogue drive you like cattle to his desired conclusion).
In active reading, however, you are the master of the book. You dogear pages to return to them. You flip back and you flip forward. You write in the margins. And so, in fact, the good active reader will argue with the book: will take the codex, spend maybe three or four hours interacting with it, and from the black marks on the page spin up a sub-Turing instantiation of the author’s mind, run it on their own wetware, and have in their mind’s eye—and who is to say that is not as real as the actual eye—a Sokrates on the other end of the log, answering questions. As Machiavelli wrote in 1513, when he goes into his library: “I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients... where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me...”.
But for only a small slice of society, only for the truly hyperliterate, is it the case that they—we—have managed to train our brains to make active reading second nature. The rest of humanity cannot do it.
The right use of GPT LLM technology is to provide a route-around: rather than having to train yourself for years to become a hyperliterate active reader and spinner-up of sub-Turing instantiations of authors’ minds, you can have a dialogue with Sub-TuringAuthorBot(TM):
Alex Tolley:
...
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