Ask HN: Are books worth it?

Books shouldn't be about absorbing "information." Think of them as intellectual obstacle courses. A good book should challenge you, either with radically new ideas or radically new viewpoints. I basically can't do serious thinking (i.e. not administrative or programming thinking but broader thinking about ideas) without reading.

On the other hand, you're not going to get this experience from "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or whatever, and if you haven't built these muscles you probably shouldn't be starting with Gulliver's Travels or Walter Ong or some other really challenging thing.

First of all, throw out your self help books and just read Thinking Fast and Slow, which 80% of self-help books have ripped off for the past 20 years. It's more boringer (I have a PhD so I can say things like that), but it at least isn't just a bunch of cute anecdotes for an executive to amuse themselves with while there's no wifi on a plane.

Second, start building those muscles with the few people who are both challenging and accessible. George Orwell is great for this, read Homage to Catalonia and get a collection of his essays. Read a few Beckett plays, try Endgame and scratch your head at that shit. Read some Neil Postman and be like, yeah, he was right about technology.

The idea with books isn't to make yourself know more stuff, though that does happen to some extent. The idea is to improve your character and model the world better. You're increasing WIS, not INT. If you're feeling impatience when you pick up a book, if you get that feeling after three pages that you need to put it down and move on to reading 40 news sites, that's your weak-ass WIS. It basically means your brain is flabby. You're like the person at the gym who hasn't been in 4 years. Just push through, give it a week or two and you won't have that feeling.

P.S. People, stop calling things "content." "Content" is what you put the ads around. Goddamn civilizational collapse.

I come from the academic world where the right references were (and still are) a big thing. I spent long hours on libraries when gathering information (from when I was a kid to when preparing my PhD in physics).

Today my children, when preparing some presentations for school, rely exclusively on Internet, starting with Wikipedia.

I told them that one needs to cross check sources and whatnot. To this we went together to our library to do this the right way.

What a nightmare. We lost so much time going through books and books to find the averzge size of a horse, or how Versailles was built.

All this was readily available on internet, from zillion sources. From Encyclopedia Britannica and from the blog of John Doe who thought that horses weighted 2000 ks.

So yes, for non-fiction books are not worth it. Once someone learns to be skeptical (which, by the way, the old "books are sanctuaries" approach will not teach) then Internet is the way to go.

Often the point of a non-fiction book is to spend hours thinking deeply about the book's subject. You could probably get the major ideas in the length of a short blog post. But that's spending 10 minutes thinking about the topic as opposed to 2-3 hours.

You can think of it as the difference between reading about a subject online and having a long conversation about that subject with friends. For me personally, the length and guided interaction of a book makes a difference

I've heard the best predictor of performance on IQ tests is number of books read.

In my experience, reading a book forces me to conceptualize the content in a way watching TV and listening to audio does not. It is also faster than watching and listening. I think this has improved my conceptual thinking ability, as well as being able to articulate my thoughts, and expanded the number of concepts I can use in my thinking.

My general experience is well read people seem to generally be more open minded and better able to understand other points of view. On the other hand, in the social media world of sound bites and text snippets, the ability to have a logically coherent extended discussion seems to be diminishing.

Yes, it does sound like reading books can improve a person's mind, and that can sound elitist, but it may well be true.