Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious.
But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books.
>> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway?
I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.
But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books.
>> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway?
I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.