I used to think that reading made people smarter and more openminded but this board is as dumb as any other board here. How is this possible?

reading is just the possibility to be exposed to new ideas and views, it does not mean people actually internalize them, but it at least exposes them to the possibility
and on top of that, many views and ideas in literature are inherently dumb and closed minded, so even if reading made someone change, it is not always for the better
i guess the myth comes from the fact that people that are wise and mature usually also have read a lot, ignoring all those that have read just as much or maybe even more and instead of it making them wise and mature it made them even dumber and even more immature by giving them an echo chamber to feed their confirmation bias

>>24517199 (OP)
It's a slow board and lots of users from other boards come her and sperg about offtopic stuff

>>24517199 (OP)
because nobody here actually reads. and "reading" doesnt make you smarter comprehention does

>>24517207
>>24517226
>reading only makes you smarter with high reading comprehesion skills.
So one must read a lot, read diverse material, actively study the literature they are reading, discuss with others?

Seems like a lot of anons dont even understand what they read a lot of the time.

>>24517199 (OP)
It’s not though. /lit/ is the smartest board there is. There are a lot of anons here who are incredibly knowledgeable about philosophy, theology, history and literature and share their insights everyday in well thought out arguments.

dog i do not want to think too much about reading or thought because scholasticism still has me a bit fucked up

i will say that i think the global pandemics sundering of consciousness attendant information technology all play a role in the ongoing broken discourse of our speech or speechly discourse

>>24517199 (OP)
Consider that there are people who read the Bible over and over and over for years. And that they are here. Or people that only read things that they agree and won't read anything else that confronts their views on anything and will stop reading as soon as they start disagreeing with an author.

There are anons here who have read a smattering of secondary sources and think they're experts on difficult philosophers like Kant and Aristotle. There's a whole gang of tradcath zoomers who think Aristotle was a realist about universals even though he argues against this position non-stop in the Metaphysics. This is because they heard somewhere (a blog? a book?) that Aristotle was a 'realist' (which he is, compared to someone like Hume); they might have skimmed the Metaphysics itself but they never really studied it; so when someone like me points out the priority of the particular, the reciprocity of quia and propter quid; what Aristotle says about the particularity of essence in Meta 7 and Meta 12; etc, they don't know what I'm talking about, but it contradicts what they think they know, so they call me a pseud, when they are in fact the biggest pseuds on the board.

>>24517753
(cont'd) Of course the reason they think this way, and the reason they get so incredibly butt-flustered when I point out how retarded they are, is that they have read (where? a blog? a book?) that if universals aren't hypostasized Essences then you end up with le evil modernity and this is why they have never had sex in their entire pathetic lives. So for them the problem of universals (extremely controversial and interesting) becomes a front in the culture wars. They think 'Aristotelian realism' (contradiction in terms btw) is a settled matter because all they read are Thomist and neoplatonist popularizers. They have no idea how complex this debate actually is, but it's impossible to have a conversation with the because they do not even know the meanings of the relevant terms and, again, have never read the Metaphysics, at least not with any concentration. Certainly not 20 or 30 times.

>>24517753
>>24517767
You're an Occamist, it's a real position, we get it. Calm the fuck down before you give yourself a heart attack.