I actually suspect the decline of close reading has been catastrophic to economic growth.
Being able to parse the differences in how the same word is being used in different contexts becomes extremely important in a data-driven world, because data is always in danger of morphing into an unchallengeable story which isn’t true.
I actually suspect the decline of close reading has been catastrophic to economic growth.
Being able to parse the differences in how the same word is being used in different contexts becomes extremely important in a data-driven world, because data is always in danger of morphing into an unchallengeable story which isn’t true.
And it does this through the mutability of language – a word is taken to mean something slightly different to its communicator’s intent, several times, and we start to say “the data doesn’t care if you think it’s wrong.” Maybe. But I worry what we think the data said is not what it did say, and that we’ve ended up with a society that doesn’t even understand this as an issue.
So I’m into the humanities because I think it’s really, really important to be alert to language leading you down a garden path. I don’t know that today’s humanities are very good at that; the skill feels eroded everywhere? But that’s not the same as saying it is critically important and is not valued. So I read books from sixty years ago in the bath
I actually suspect the decline of close reading has been catastrophic to economic growth.
Being able to parse the differences in how the same word is being used in different contexts becomes extremely important in a data-driven world, because data is always in danger of morphing into an unchallengeable story which isn’t true.
And it does this through the mutability of language – a word is taken to mean something slightly different to its communicator’s intent, several times, and we start to say “the data doesn’t care if you think it’s wrong.” Maybe. But I worry what we think the data said is not what it did say, and that we’ve ended up with a society that doesn’t even understand this as an issue.
So I’m into the humanities because I think it’s really, really important to be alert to language leading you down a garden path. I don’t know that today’s humanities are very good at that; the skill feels eroded everywhere? But that’s not the same as saying it is critically important and is not valued. So I read books from sixty years ago in the bath