You’re commenting on an article about reading, which is also a solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you’re not trying to make the point that reading books destroys relationships and self construction, so this seems like a roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption activity is better than what other people choose.

> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.

I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.

Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.

Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.

>But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.

Cervantes, 1605:

>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...

Now we're all Men of La Mancha.

One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.

David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.

    The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it?

1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.

2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.

3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.

Or democracy will perish eventually.

Both composing text and reading map closely to thinking.

The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).

For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.

I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern times.

> Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article

Strange that religion isn't mentioned in the article.

Religion is the bedrock of epistemological 'collapse'.

> Amusing Ourselves to Death

From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.

Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?

I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.

Let alone the median general public.

I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks. Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10 or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least between the two.

The COVID school closures and remote learning years will prove to be the biggest negative educational/developmental impact on a generation that we've seen in a long time.

>I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.

What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?

Are demographics controlled for here? We know the proportion of foreign born has been increasing since the 70s, are these results attempting to remove the effect of non-native speakers?

For me Guttenberg is an actor famous for Police Academy, Short Circuit, and Three Men And A Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg

There’s also a confusing typo in “the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online”. I presume “gauze” was intended be “gaze”.

> Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots

Tautology.

> The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group

There is no causal link here.

It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always.

Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.

Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.

> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group

Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:

* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.

* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.

* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.

Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.

You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on?

I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.

The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to control their position. It has always been useful to control the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy us like music notes completing a chord progression. Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain compatibility. It just exists.

I envision that meme of having large bookshelves filled with books, something I could show off to friends as a proof that there is still plenty to be found in books, that I've found valuable in books. That on some days I might take the time to sit down, brew some tea or something, and read a book.

This. I couldn’t agree more. The text is searchable, indexable, word definitions can be searched right within the text, highlights are saved and indexable, etc.

Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.

> Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions?

That's a great question.

The answer is very well known. It started both.

Quote of the day.

Disclosure: I worked on developing smartboard technology for students in my country.

Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...

On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?

There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.

I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.

From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.

We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.

If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.

The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.

The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.

I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes.

When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.

YouTube and podcasts are fine as an introduction to a topic, but they are and do encourage passive consumption. It's fine for reciting shallow factoids in class and getting grades, but won't make you an expert in a field. If you can't maintain enough attention to read, you'll always have to rely on processed, second hand information. That's why reading needs to be taught as a skill, and heavily encouraged.

I find three challenges with YouTube and podcasts:

1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.

2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.

3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life

That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.

Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books

The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll eventually reach a point where you need information that is only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.

There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about how a record number of university students in Sweden are struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of reading and extracting the necessary information needed from the textbooks.

> Students who use ChatGPT ... to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated ...

Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your observations of your younger relatives?

Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years spent mastering' with LLMs.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades

Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?

Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.

When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.

> Times have changed.

Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.

> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].

Proof needed. You can't just say that.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.

The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.

And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.

Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more efficient to build a high level map of the subject using podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and the end result is the same.

Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.

Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...

I think it is two-sided.

The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.

The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.

> extracting information

> excellent grades

have nothing to do with interiority -- the main thrust of the article

They get excellent grades because they make sure the professor feels that they agree with them on political and ideological issues. Be a nice and friendly person, and agree with the academics on their political beliefs and you will get good grades. Knowledge has nothing to do with academic grades.

You could as well have written that you know young people who get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their school papers.

What will they do when there isn't a podcast or video to teach them a concept?

I think it’s far too early to state that with any confidence.

Grades are irrelevant

We all know students with good grades who struggle at exams

Keep in mind that some of the criteria have changed as well over time, probably not as fast as technology itself, but skills like reading comprehension are tested for less in favor of e.g. tech literacy.

I don’t think ChatGPT belongs with the other two. It essentially counts as reading.

Every time I read about the next generation not being able to read, I recall all the boomers falling for penis enlargement pill scams again and again. Exactly the people who complain about standard tests being too easy nowadays are the people who panic at the sight of a self-checkout.

Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with: "Use decent software. And make copies."

And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?

I think it's much more fundamental than this; the new speed and new methods with which information can be spread are themselves the problem. Misinformation is downstream of this. The more fundamental problem seems to be tribalism, which sort of information can be spread quickly, (anything with strong emotional content, outrage, etc.) and the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding. (eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round? Or, do they know the earth is round because this is what they've been taught. I'll bet most of HN does understand this, but most people could no produce this if asked without any sort of preparation.)

The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.

Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in a class full of kids much smarter than me.

As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).

Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often.

The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.

I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.

> Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.

This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.

[0] http://www.alpinist.com/ [1] https://www.surfersjournal.com/

Totally agree! I subscribe to one magazine which is published once a quarter, it costs me about $40/year for the subscription but is well worth it to me as the content is not available anywhere else. Definitely a niche market but the rag does a very good job of catering exactly to its market. There’s still some ads but only a handful per issue that normally has 60-100 pages total.

We still get Architectural Digest and I enjoy looking at it in a way I never would online.

That seems a bit wasteful? Any time you want to read a new book you buy a whole new reading device? It might be cheap but that's more e-waste we don't need.

Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card? You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading experience can then be totally offline as you describe.

> It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.

Oh no, that’s just… why?

At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp.

I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.

I think the Internet medium is sufficiently different from past advancements that such analogies don't work. It's not necessarily that the Internet brings fundamentally different capabilities, perhaps we can reason about how its new scale makes some capabilities emerge as others, but it's the same outcome either way.

> Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?

At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when the conventionally powerful people own the content producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not simple at all, who to listen to.

I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows you to context switch to a million different things, and even an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work.

There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours to the library/store to return the old one and download a new one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero, you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you took the time to pick out.

Writing digitally is cheaper but that's exactly why distributing or getting reach is not cheap at all. You still need cost and proof of work in getting noticed by algorithms, as well as people who usually set trends. In fact, the lower cost of production means that more niche things get written than there would have been a market for.

> Only selected few buy books, because it costs money

I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)

Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has always been so, or worse.

<golf clap>

It's basically constant that many people will fearmonger and some will embrace new technology. I think this is basically independent of the actual merits and drawbacks of the given technology. Regardless of these strange asymptotes, I would say technology has been advancing from less benefit/risk to more in time, and so we will get closer to the fearmongerers being right. I suppose it could mean that we harness the benefits and waive the risks, but in practice it seems unlikely.

Perhaps the author doesn't make the case well, but the implication is that reading print primes the mind in a way that presents better emotional and intellectual consumption of the content.

> an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction

Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth.

That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable.

And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed.

https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...

I went and checked the page in another browser with my adblocker off. Wow. Just wow. I started using ad blockers on everything a few years ago because they became a little too annoying. I somehow missed when the web became nigh unusable from them.

The irony is that even the ads on the site are so terrible they take a good 30 seconds to fully load.

When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like it did with an adblocker on, but eventually: https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm

I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked the link.

I disabled brave shields for a moment and wow. Especially the youtube-like iframe that slid in from the right. Crazy.

> all produced information is unavoidably narrativization

This is a future possibility but it has not yet come to pass, and we can still avoid it. We are not yet adrift in a sea of epistemological relativism where everyone has their own truth, and no objective truth can be discerned. We don't need to succumb to this kind of nihilism. Truth and objective reality are still discernable and approachable. Philosophical objections to the Truly objective viewpoint are not the limiting factor.

"Everything is just a narrative" is the cry of those who don't have truth on their side. The current state of mass media is the result of their cries becoming louder. We don't have to go along with it.

The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.

I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment.

Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people.

I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons.

So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are.

This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep.

You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.

I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language. Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a higher standard in a piece about literature and written media and books.

Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.

Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.

I can’t help but imagine some of the folks this message is referring to as “needing to read more” seeing this and dismissing it as using language of “the elites”. There’s a certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.

I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers: git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)

Which of those references are obscure?

I put random paragraphs into a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level assessment calculator, which suggests the US school grade level required to understand the assessed text. It consistently returned between Grade 8 and 9.

Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.

It's for people that read books and have done so for a long time. That's all it takes to appreciate it, you really don't need to be a scholar.