Instead of an essay today, you get 2 hours of me pontificating on Amusing Ourselves to Death. I ended up on several related tangents, such as applying the theory to LLMs, following up on my audiobook argument from last week, and explaining why I’m fascinated by Hamilton as an example of what Postman deemed the Typographic Mind. Next week, we’ll finish the book, and I’ll start Brave New World, which should be read alongside this text.
00:00 Why Reading Matters
01:32 Audiobooks vs Print
04:38 Postman and Media Shapes Thought
08:25 From Print to TV to Phone
13:31 Writing, Plato, and Truth
18:13 Media as Epistemology
21:26 Studies as truth tokens and shallow thinking
24:19 Memes and resonance
28:26 Rhetoric and print culture
47:58 Intelligence has a definition, and not all learning styles are equal
54:22 Credentials vs Thinking
55:18 Print to TV Epistemology
57:15 What happens when reading habits degrade
01:00:17 Typographic America Origins
01:16:06 Lincoln-Douglas debates, rhetoric and oral transmission of ideas
01:23:24 Why reading trains reason
01:26:56 LLMs and Fake Truth
01:33:26 Visual Memes vs Ideas
01:36:51 Rationality under attack
01:43:28 Wrap Up and Next Week
