Fuck AI

I'd be okay with cliff notes. At least they learned something

We were reading a part of a book on cyber warfare which describes the various stages of shenanigans that led us to the first cyber war against Ukraine.

It's non technical.

I teach networking and security

For many people, reading is boring.

And sometimes it's the role of education to expose students to things they benefit from but wouldn't necessarily seek out on their own. Reading comprehension and use of language is a vital skill to function as an adult in society, and to acquire that you need to read, a lot. Short texts, long texts, different styles, poetry, prose, etc. There's really no way around it.

I can't visualize nearly at all and when I was younger I would devour a novel daily. I have ADHD and a strong internal monologue.

I don't read books very often now and I think the reason for this is that my need is somewhat met (and maybe partially overwhelmed) by reading things online, unfortunately the majority of the things I read online are lower quality and creativity than a book would be.

What if the visuals and monologues are trained and not gifted?

I hated reading for years and years, I read well above grade level in school but honestly hated it.

Decades later, I got into audio books, which kickstarted me reading.

The visuals I've gotten over the years went from almost nothing to vivid recreations.

An interesting thought... I was always a bookworm and absolutely devoured books as a child. But it's definitely true that I have the full imagination suite running in my head. 3D environments and objects, picture, sound, even little echoes of smell, touch and taste...I probably wouldn't find fiction as engaging without that trait. But is me having that because I was given the opportunity to develop that skill early? My parents read to me quite a lot when I was small after all... Or is it just entirely innate?

The whole thing about school is that it isn't generally great at personal tailoring and in some instances there's some ethics around kneecaping students by just funneling them into what's easy and closing off avenues that they might find engaging or need to engage with later. If you decide to not learn language skills and you later decide you want to go to University you are just kind of screwed. A certain amount of basics is just training you to play the game. Brains are also a develop and use it or don't have it and lose it situation. What is actually being asked when a kid is given a memorization task for instance is less about them being able to cough up that specific fact later and more about the mental process of forming that neural connection so you can apply it later. If you don't train the ability to memorize a memory remains weak. It's in part why different generations appear to have different mental strengths and weaknesses characteristically. A mind needs to train individual processes and tweaks in school programs are always trying to optimize. Some people have natural gifts in certain areas but if they never are given application to need them they underdevelop.

Your experience in school is also pretty typical. The average kid can only pay strict attention to something for about their age in minutes. Bored and annoyed is just sort of what happens regardless. More modern approaches factor this in and include more regular refresh breaks for young people... but the classical default is basically to just keep a class doing a thing for long periods while their student's individual brains cycle in and off task and accept a certain amount of student unhappiness as just a casualty of the process.

Pretty much incapable of visualizing, even the simple apple experiment, but have loved reading since I was a kid. I've found myself when reading skimming a lot of the description sections and mostly following the dialogue, where most of the meat in books actually happens. I actually don't think I'd be able to write a book for the reason that I couldn't do the description section.

In my case I was read to sleep every night before bed when younger, so perhaps it was positive association that made it stick with me?