Superbowl Thoughts

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

The local SSC/rationalist group meets for lunch on Sundays, and today we talked about (among other things) the inferential gap between the sorts of people who come to an SSC meetup and the general public. Reading volume is a particularly salient example. Supposedly, the average reading quantity is on the order of 200,000 words per year. I haven't verified this number but it seems relatively in-line with the average number of books read per year, which is easier to survey.

My friend who brought this up estimates he reads about 4 million per year. (He sanity-checked this number in units of Worms.) That's an order-of-magnitude difference, and probably doesn't include other non-fiction reading that many of us do. I haven't tracked how many words I read per year, but could use my Goodreads data to get an estimate. I do know, however, that I recently read a pair of 75k fanfics in less than a week. Taken with my other time on AO3, I've already read more fan fiction this year than the average person reads in books. And I don't think of myself as a big fan fiction reader.

Fast-forward an hour or so to when I got home and my parents more-or-less impromptu decided we should go to the book store. This seemed resonant by itself, then I remembered it's Superbowl Sunday. My family went to Barnes & Noble and didn't get back till well after the game had started—at which point I began to cook dinner instead of worrying about the TV.

I don't feel particularly superior about a disinterest in sports anymore—baseball is fairly engaging, for instance, once you gain a working knowledge base—but it definitely illustrates how far from the median a number of my major social circles actually are.